Contingency
by The 483
Summary: The end of the Brood Wars left her the free and undisputed of ruler of the Swarm. Withdrawing the majority of her Zerg from the sector in no means meant that she was inactive. Always a shrewd and clever sentient, even before she was evolved, the Queen of Blades would be sure to have plans in place for all forseeable instances. Built around an Original Characterand Kerrigan.
1. Birth

**Starcraft: Contingency**

**Disclaimer: I do Not own Starcraft.**

_**Gonna give this a shot, see if I can't come u with something entertaining.**_

**Chapter 1: Birth**

_-1 year after the end of the Brood War-_

Emily Park thrashed in her sleep, her body twisting and contorting as it floated suspended in fluid. Her eyelids twitched as her mind was assaulted by nightmares and memories. And pain. So much pain at times even the nightmares blacked out as her mind failed under its sway.

A flash of wavy green grass and a battered corpse would flash in her dreams, her first incident, back before her parent knew she was psionic. She never knew who the person was, only that he had scared her, and seemed to implode with horrible crunching noises as she fainted. There had been so much blood on her own face, from ruptured vessels when she woke up, she had just sat and cried until someone found her.

More flashes, her being taken from her home by the dominion soldiers, the painful clasp of the collar that weakened her Psionics for handling, the years of intensive and grueling training, and then... nothing but dark.

She thrashed again as the blank spot that was her 5 years of work as a Confederacy and then Dominion Ghost had been. When they wiped the early memories, they had added the now standard block that had been standard procedure since the rouge Ghost Gabriel Tosh had begun abducting and releasing Ghosts from Mengsk's program for his own means. It kept them from recalling what they had done and compromising other operatives if they were captured and given the Terrazine gas that destroyed the Resoc. Her head in snapped back as the next memory hit her.

It was a fist, slamming her full in the face. Her mouth was bloody, and not just her own; she had bitten her doctor in a crazy haze of returning memories and emotions.

She shivered as her arms burned in her very bones.

More flashes, combat in many locations, gunning down EDF, Protoss, and Zerg. Biting stabs of phantom thoughts made in long dead heads. Then her last memory.

She was on some backwoods planet, working with a freelance group that were hunting clutches of Zerg left behind after they retreated back to their core world. They were especially active, and after they had knocked of a pair of hatcheries, they swarmed. Waves of living flesh crashed against their bunkers and turrets, forming tides of the dead, but there were hundreds of the bugs, and they were slowly getting overrun. She relived the fall as she got hit by a pair of Hydralisk barbs, piercing her shoulder and side. The bastard slithered up to her, hissing and roared, it's mandibles flared and carapace rattling as it's jaw flashed forward.

Her eyes shot open in the fluid filled tank, and she screamed, and screamed, and screamed until she subsided back into her tortuous coma.

(...)

_-1 month later-_

Emily Park came awake suddenly with the realization that she could not breathe. She was confused, and her eyes snapped open, a dark, almost glowing green, as panic flared in her mind as she began to drown. She thrashed and spun around suspended in some yellowish tinged, cloudy liquid, until her hands found a soft surface. She pounded at it, then scratched. Her fingernails were long, and dug furrows out of the surprisingly soft surface, but it did not breach. She started to flail when she felt a second set of appendages she was not familiar with twitch as she moved them. This was weird, as she was not aware of ever having had these limbs before, but they worked as if she had always used them. She did not analyze it, as she was starting to black out, but flexed the appendages and drove it forward, where it pierced the soft surface far enough that she could feel the warm air on the other side. She jerked, and with a rushing sensation of movement, she was sucked out and down, sliding along the ground on her stomach in a wave of fluid.

She coughed up globs of liquid and gel, raising herself to her hands and knees as she vomited a bigger stream of the fluid onto the ground. Her eyes were open, but they took just hazy colors and the vague shapes of her hands. It looked as if her hands and arms were suddenly brown, but she couldn't focus her mind on it.

She felt rather that heard a soft, amused laugh, and raised her head, still coughing. She got the hazy impression of a woman standing in front of a dead tree. She could even hear the clicking noise of the branches as they collided in a light breeze. Were she not so disoriented from her revival, she would have wondered why she could pick up no thought emanations from this woman. She was in no state, shocked and her brain still burning with fever, to muster the control necessary to block the brain waves of others.

It was warmer outside than it had been in the tank, and she could smell acrid, burned earth and another hot smell she recognized as melted rock. But the ground was not hard and hot under her bare legs and hands; it was pleasantly warm and soft, slightly springy, not what one would expect given the clearly volcanic atmosphere her senses detected. Her hair hung in wet folds to either side of her neck, its tips dangled in and out of her hazy vision as she continued to cough up the sweet tasting liquid. The liquid continued to stream down her naked body as it evaporated and a sudden embarrassed thought struck her.

_I'm naked._

It was an absurd thought, given all the unknowns, but it was a knee jerk reaction. The amused laugh wafted through her mind, softer this time, a cool river that calmed her fevered brain.

_Welcome, child. _The others voice was solely in her mind, and still held traces of amusement, pride, and satisfaction that steamed off the thought like mist. _Arise._ The command knifed through her brain and shattered of her fever like the snapping of a rubber band. Her coughing ended and Emily brought her shaky legs up under her and stood. She had to shift, she seemed to weigh less that she remembered, and her center of balance was different. The blurred woman moved closer and her hand raised, brushing Emily's cheek softly with the back of her hand. The hand was boney and rough, even through the caress was almost tender.

Ants skittered across Emily's brain, crawling through her skull before burrowing in and probing.

_Good,_ the thoughts crashed against her again, _no mental degradation, and the stains I have increased your Psionic powers in line with my projections._

"What?" Emily said, blinking. She then realized that the reason her eyes were blurred because of a buildup of the gel from the tank. She brought her arm and brushed the back of it across her eyes, wiping away the gunk. She was slightly unnerved now; the back of her arm, and even her hand as she used her fingers to clear the rest of the gunk from her eyes was hard and ridged, though it felt normal on the inside. She took a breath, suddenly filed with dread, opened her eyes, and almost fainted. Psionic assistants from the other "woman" was all that kept her on her feet.

Black clouds of smoke churned lazily in the dull red sky visible in all directions over the rims of the deep volcanic rock crater in which she stood. Rivulets of lava flowed between chinks in the rocks and cast a dull orange glow from deeper crevasses. Beneath her, and stretching the entire length of the defile was the purplish, squishy, pulsating carpet of creep that always accompanied a Zerg infestation. The "woman" in front of her was none other than the Queen of Blades herself. There was no mistaking the figure with her long, segmented "hair," her wicked looking blade wings, the polished brown chitin that covered her body, and the brooding, glowing yellow eyes.

But standing little more than a foot from the most deadly creature in the known universe was not the most unnerving part of the whole experience. Around her, standing in rings, were hundreds upon hundreds of Zerg. Not unusual, but the creepy part was that they were all standing completely still, like horrifying statues. There was no noise from them, and in a way, that was more frightening that the chattering that usually came with the swarms forces. Emily's first coherent thought was "why am I not dead yet?"

"Simple." The Queen answered her unspoken question. "You live because you are mine." Her voice was quiet and almost soothing. Emily brought her hand up and looked at it. It was now light brown; a clawed gauntlet of ridged chitin that completely covered the flesh. The ridged plating continued up her arm as far as she could see, a curved, protruding spike at her elbow. Smoother, yellowish-brown plating in two solid pieces. Deep green plates were present in the forearm, with matching colored striations woven into upper arm shell. She flexed her fingers, dizzy at what she saw, then reached up to touch her face. To her face skin, her fingers felt hard, but she was able to feel the softer skin of her face through the chitin shell of her gauntlet.

"What... am I?" She asked, speaking aloud. Her voice sounded different, now that she heard it aloud. There was a slight reverberation deeply layered in it, and it seemed to thrum with a calm power.

"You are part of the Swarm." Her new Queen answered easily.

"You mean... I am infested?" She replied shakily. She had fought the infested before; shambling zombies in grotesque mockeries of the human form. The Queen of Blades snorted derisively.

"No, nothing as crude as that. And infestation is merely a empty puppet of my will. You are so much more than that." Again the Queen caressed the side of Emily's face. She was surprised she was not repulsed at the contact. In fact, she almost welcomed the touch. Even the creep beneath her feet no longer seemed to be a stick, disgusting scab covering the land, but rather a soft, almost comforting presence. Emily met the Queens eyes, glowing dimly yellow.

"I took your body, and crafted it into a form useful to me, such as I myself by the Overmind itself." She smiled slightly, reflecting on memories. "No, my child, you are not Infested in the sense of combat husk. You have been...transfigured, or Hybridized."

"... why?" Emily asked meekly.

"To be one of my generals." The Queen replied with a sweeping gesture. "The Swarm will sweep through the stars, consuming, growing, evolving. I will dominate the galaxy, and nothing shall stand in my way." The last phrase was uttered through clenched teeth, brimming with rage. The Queen turned on her heel, and walked to the surrounding circle of Zerg. A massive Ultralisk bent its knee, and the Queen leapt upon it, coming to rest in a sitting position high upon its back.

"You have passed your first test, the first test any of us face. You have survived the birthing, unlike so many of the others harvested." She gestured with a sweep of her hand, and Emily turned, seeing more than a dozen cocoons like the partially decomposed one she had emerged from, that was being slowly absorbed back into the creep. Vaguely human shaped forms floated gently in the cloudy liquid, and she did not know how, but she was aware that all the occupants in these chambers were dead. She felt the Queens command like wind through her mind as she ordered a group of Zerglings and Hyrdalisks to destroy the failures, watching with fascination as the leapt upon them, rupturing the cocoons and devouring the corpses. It was over in less than a minute, and the Zerg returned to their places in line. The Queen chuckled softly, and the noise carried in the near silence.

"Yes, child. It is odd at first, seeing my Zerg as one of them. They look exactly the same as they did before you were turned, but now, instead of revulsion and unconditioned fear, you can see them as the beautiful creatures they are, pure death and destruction made flesh. The perfect expression of form following function. Your neural hardware only required the slightest tweaking during your reconstruction to see them as they are. You respected them us, even as you feared our coming." She stroked the Ultralisk idly as spoke, her eyes locked upon her newest creation. She hoped it lived. Over a year of still births, culls, and abominations, and finally she had one.

"There is no room for the weak among the Zerg. You have been bred with the best genes I could provide. You have earned your chance to live, and now you will prove you are worthy." She smiled slightly, a predatory grin. "Kill her." She said. A Zergling off to Emily's left snarled and leapt at her.

She could feel it's desire to tear out her throat an instant before it leapt. It was so quick she didn't have time to consciously react. Her hand shot out, gripping the writing thing by the throat. It broke under her grip and she flung it aside. Two more dashed forward, frothing and chattering, slashing arms twitching. She could sense what they were going to do before they did it. She was stronger and faster than she had ever been. She side stepped as the first leapt, spinning away and ducking under the second and slamming it in the middle with an uppercut, shattering chitin and snapping and rupturing organs. She dashed to the first as it rounded on her, catching it's sweeping slashing arms and planting an armored foot which was similar in coloration to her arm into the beasts skull, crushing it and wrenching the appendages loose.

4 more Zergling charged, and Emily brandished the dead Zerg's appendages as weapons, cleaving into the furious creatures. As she killed a third, one of the limbs snapped and she shoved the other down the last assailants throat as it leapt.

"Not bad, my pet." The Queen said. She was sitting in Emily's mind, watching through her eyes as well as her own. She could feel the surging blood her disciple, her new instincts and mutations screaming for more blood. And she complied, sending 8 more Zergling hurtling at her.

Emily felt the 8 Zerglings detach and charge, and her newly bred instincts kicked in, drawing her attention to the new appendages she had forgotten about that had released her from her second womb. She stretched them, feeling the thrill of the taut muscles as the limbs stretched and joints popped as she spread them for the first time. She caught a glimpse of them as they reached full extension. She had wings. Boney, segmented wings, like her Queen had, but she could tell just from the small look she got that they were smaller and not nearly as magnificent as her matriarchs. They retracted to a comfortable hanging, and quivered, ready to strike. They lashed out at the first Zerg to come into range, slicing it cleanly and sending the pieces to be dissolved by the creep. She spun and dove, clawing and smashing with her hands, wings flashing and slashing. More Zerglings entered the fray, falling to the Disciple of Blades as her bloodlust drove her to greater heights of violence. When the last Zergling fell, to her arching wings, she had killed 40. That was she was hit and sent sprawling across the creep, catching a hand in it and using it to slide herself to a stop. She looked up, and two Hydralisks had closed, hissing and drooling in rage. She reached out with her arm and her mind, reacting on an purely instinctual level. Psionic energy coalesced around the left hand Hydralisk, and as she Closed her fist, the creature imploded into a pulpy mass of broken armor. The other roared, it's mandibles full extended and slithered forward.

It swiped at her without full extension, catching her with the back of its scythe-like hands in the side before she could dodge, and again tossing her like a ragdoll. It slithered after her, arms raised to drive its blades into her body, and pounced. She managed to catch it's forearms just below the wicked sickles, the force and weight of the creature slamming her elbow spikes deep into the creep, and she managed to get her foot lodged against its chest. It hissed an spit, jaws urging forward, snapping mere inches away from her face, pinning her. Suddenly, it eased back, and the carapace on either side of its arms parted, exposing the powerful muscles and tips of its deadly spines. Panicking, she braced her free foot on the ground, and pushed with all her might. Her effort was strong enough against the less resistant creature that it lifted completely off the ground, landing on its own back. Emily was on top of it instantly, smashing and slashing, until little remained of her attacker.

Suddenly, she felt a presence behind her and she spun, wings arching out to strike. They stopped two feet from piercing the carapace of the Queen.

"You body knows." She remarked disinterestedly, tapping the tip of one of the blood smeared wing radials with the clawed nail of her own hand. Emily's wings retracted themselves and folded into groves in her back plating. Her yellow eyes locked again with Emily's again, and she had the feeling of being dissected. "You did well. You shall be allowed to serve me. I can see you are still frightened and confused. But you will learn to enjoy your new freedoms." She placed a finger under Emily's chin, digging into the soft flesh, but not enough to draw blood. "You name shall hence forth be Kestrel, Disciple of the Queen of Blades." She stated. And Emily felt it take hold in her own mind.

"Yes, my Queen." Kestrel replied, taking a knee in a bow. Kerrigan smirked before turning on her heel and walking back toward her Hydralisk. "Come, my disciple we have more hatcheries to visit, and you have much to learn."

Emily Park followed. She still had mixed feeling about her conversion to the Zerg, but if felt right. But whether that was because of the conditioning she had while in the Zerg womb or not, she did not know. But for the first time in her life, she felt a true sense of purpose. She was no long just a drifting mercenary, or a brain washed assassin. She did not know why or how, but she knew she had an important role to play, and she the prospect excited her.

**End 1.**

**Alright. Just trying stuff here, seeing where it goes. If you read it, thanks. May have the next part up in the next couple of days, but not sure. Has more direction than most I start, so we'll see where it takes us.**


	2. Take a knee

**Starcraft: Contingency**

**Disclaimer: I do Not own Starcraft.**

_**Gonna give this a shot, see if I can't come u with something entertaining.**_

**Chapter 1: Birth**

_-2 hours after the birth of Kestrel-_

The bloated, gaseous Overlord floated easily through the turbulent air above the molten surface of Char. It was flanked by no less that 3 dozen Mutalisks, a dozen Corruptors, and 4 giant Brood Lords. Kestrel sat forward of her Queen, he knees drawn up to her chest, looking out over the desolate, Zerg covered landscape, or admiring the monsters that surrounded them.

_How much of this newfound respect for your Zerg is due to your tinkering?_ Kestrel thought at Kerrigan.

"Much of it is simply a result of the crossbreeding. As a said before, you are not merely one of my mindless infested. No, I created you in much the same way I was created by the Overmind." Facing her disciple's back, Kerrigan chose to speak, rather than project. She sat upon a raised section of the Overlords Chitin as if it were a throne. It was both odd and gratifying to have an underling to talk to. "You have been bonded with the DNA of the Swarm. You are Zerg now, as much as I am."

_What do you mean, you were created like I was?_ Kestrel sent back. She could feel the knowing smile in her mind.

"I was a Ghost who was harvested by the Overmind. I was once the Human Ghost known as Sarah Kerrigan." Emily pivoted on her ass to face Kerrigan so fast she lost balance and had to brace herself with her hands to keep from sliding off of the Overlord.

"Wait, _the_ Sarah Kerrigan?" Emily was shocked.

"As far as I am aware." She replied casually. "Why?"

"Because Sarah Kerrigan was the most famous recruit to ever pass through the Confederate Ghost Program. She... I mean, you... were the example we all strived to amount to. One of the most proficient specialists that the confederacy, or even the Dominion had ever had, with a Psionic profile that had not been matched until November Terra was discovered. But we were all told you were killed in the conflicts against the Sons of Korhal." She caught a bitter stab from Kerrigan at this, that was quickly suppressed.

"No, I was not killed by the Sons of Korhal. Not directly. I was Arcturus Mengsk's right hand for most of his little rebellion; I had defected and joined them back when they were still a small terrorist organization. We had a weapon that attracted the Zerg, and I planted it on Tarsonis. And once it was triggered, I was abandoned by the people I trusted, and left to the Zerg as they blanketed the planet." She was quiet for a long time and the flashes of emotion dancing through her eyes as she thought on her past made Emily glad she wasn't privy to these thoughts. Her eyes pulsed once more with blinding rage, then subsided, but her wings continued to twitch.

"But such things are the past. When the time comes, I will rip Mengsk's skin from his bones personally. The other human... he earned a quick, painless death, for helping to free me from the Overmind." There was something about her manner that told Emily there was far more to it that, but she would not be the one to ask. Kerrigan shook the last of her human regrets back to where they resided, and returned her focus to her newest creation.

"You have taken to being a Zerg far better than I would have expected. I did not alter your brain forms in any significant way outside an increased capacity for Psionics. You are mentally as you were before the conversion, yet you accepted it with little trouble. Why?" Kestrel thought about this, noticing that Kerrigan was waiting for her to reply rather than plucking the information out of her as she thought.

"I am not sure. I guess I just had no strong ties left to humanity. I lost most of my life to the Ghost program, and when I was extracted, 5 years just ceased to exist. After that, I just moved around, no real purpose. I suppose being a Zerg isn't really any big deal." She shrugged. She did not know if this was really what she felt, or if Kerrigan was lying and the indoctrination ran deep, but she was practical, and figured there was nothing she could do about it either way.

"A good stance." Kerrigan said. "But I have left your mind to you. You will be far more use to me with fewer ties to my direct consciousness.

"But... why me?" Kerrigan snorted.

"Simple. You survived where the others died." She smiled at her young protégée. "But that is not what you meant." She looked pensive, trying to get her thoughts to form words. "I am... apprhensive. I have several hundred million of the best sensors evolution can provide spread across nearly every planet in the sector, all hooked directly into my skull. My numbers and abilities can bring pause, if not outright destruction to any other forces that care to challenge me. And yet I can feel it, an unease, so subtle that it took me a long time to realize that it is not any one single factor that is making it. This unease is laced into the very genetics of the Zerg, so miniscule that it is only detectable because of the sheer size of the Swarm, and my attunement to them. The Terrans are weak, and the Protoss all but extinguished. They cannot be the cause of this... foreboding. I do not like unknowns, especially ones that can stir unrest in anything as powerful as my Swarm. I will discover what this is, and I believe having pawns under my sway but still individuals, will aid me in this."

"So, I am your pawn, but you say you do not hold control over my allegiance. What is there to keep me loyal to you then?" Kestrel asked it in a flat, neutral tone while projecting the thoughts to show she wasn't going to try anything. She knew that Kerrigan would destroy her before she could have moved.

"Wise." She stated on the unspoken words. "To put it simply, I can kill you with a mere thought, wherever you are. Have no doubt, I could rip you apart with my hands, or my Psionics, but I like to think of myself as a careful woman. I had a special organ grown in you. All it does is allow me to kill you if you become too big for your britches, a failsafe, if you will.. I like aggression, but not in excess." She stopped and looked over the side of the Overlord. "We are here. Come."

The Overlord lowered itself to the ground, and its escort peeled off to roost. Kerrigan leapt lightly to the ground, and Emily followed suit. They were in another depression, similar in all respects to the one she had been born in. A looming, pulsating hatchery stood alone on the creep, with more than thirty of the incubation pods housing the shadowed shapes of humans. Kerrigan looked over them, testing each with her mind, then shook her head sadly.

"Culls, all of them." She waved a dismissive hand, and Zerglings erupted up from underground and began their work, removing the evidence that the pods had ever existed.

"Why so many?" Emily asked, following her back to the waiting flier. She did not respond until they were underway to the next hive.

"I was a fluke." She confided, absently. "Creating a viable hybrid is more a matter of luck and the subjects resilience than a product of the creators work." She stared off in the distance. "This is the 3rd batch of attempts I have made. Harvesting those with Psionic potential is easy. We can sense it, even if it is only on a PI scale of less than 1. And with my own Terran DNA added to the swarm, I can select to maximize the result." She returned he attention to Emily. "I think it may be easier to convert Ghosts, due to the endurance and affinity for punishment that we take during the course of our training." The yellow glow in her eyes darkened, and Emily caught the image of a kitten on a steel table off the Queen. She placed her hands under her chin and leaned forward.

"You are a success, even if I have to kill you, for now I am sure the process can be refined, and strengthened. When my next batch of subjects is delivered, I will be able to work from your pattern, which should up the chances for a positive. You are the first live birth I have had that did not need intervention to escape the pod. All of the have been abominations, even within the context of the Zerg."

"If it is so difficult, why hybridize? Can you not create a intelligent strain from simply from assimilated code?" Emily did not know how she knew this. She guessed it came from the process of becoming Zerg. She confirmed this with a thought, and smiled bitterly at the same time."

"In some ways, I am not as powerful as the Overmind was. I cannot create viable Cerebrates. Even working from the single remaining Cerebrates, the one that I liberated and remained loyal during the Brood Wars, tissue, all attempts were horrifyingly insane and disgusting failures. To a lesser extent, I have the Brood Mothers, but they suffer from the same fault as the Cerebrates."

"What fault is that, my Queen?" Emily was genuinely interested; something she hadn't been in far too long. She found the desire to learn gnawing at her almost as a physical hunger. And Kerrigan, to her surprise, found she enjoyed the eager thirst to understand this woman possessed. Even though she had been fairly withdrawn in her Human life, the lack of having anyone with whom you could share any kind of understanding with was something you never realized you missed until you found it after having lost it. Kerrigan felt a brief, sharp pang of sadness in the pit of her soul. She missed Jim.

True, she had been fully possessed by her "Queen of Blades" personality while dominated by the Overmind and during her consolidation of the Broods. But with the death of the second Overmind, her fractured personality cemented, and she became whole. Sarah Kerrigan and the Queen of Blades were one solid entity now, part human, part Zerg, but unified. There was no separating the two.

"They are pure Zerg. Me, I am more Zerg than human. But with you... Physically, you are as perfect in form as any of my pets, but in your mind... I left you as intact as I could, with only minor imprints and alterations. And I hope this limits the effect whatever is coming will have over you." Kestrel let a mental cue for elaboration hang, but Kerrigan ignored it. Kerrigan sighed once more, forced her unpleasant recriminations back in their hole, and let her determination harden her again. "We have two more hatcheries to check, and then I will begin teaching you how to be Zerg." She sat back, cut her mental voice to Kestrel, close her eyes, and began moving her minions to seed the first two incubation sites with fresh subjects.

(...)

Neither of the other two hatcheries produced a viable hybrid, and Kestrel found she was disappointed, but at the same time glad she would not have the competition another Disciple would have added. Not that she doubted her abilities, but she wanted a chance to learn the ropes without having anyone to be compared to at hand. So Kerrigan took her to a large, flat expanse well away from her own primary hive cluster. She reached into the folds of hollow chitin within her Overlord, and withdrew a squirming, writhing larva. It gnawed ineffectually at the Queens hand, struggling with all its might to get free.

"Your first task will be the starting the Kestrel Brood. This little one," She stroked the larva along its ridged back, and it wiggled around to nip her finger, "is a larva that I have specially bred to be free of my direct dominance. You will exert your control over it, and make it yours." Before Emily could ask how, Kerrigan reached into her mind, and showed her how to forge the link. It was similar to the basic forced mind probe, but once inside, all she had to do was trigger select places in the brain, alter hormone receptors, that kind of thing. It was easy in a raw Zerg like this, as it was built to be dominated. Infestations, she was to learn, required the use of specialized parasites to create "bridge" in species that were not so receptive to the rewiring.

So, using her new Zerg grown organs, not her Psionic abilities, and locked onto the struggling creatures limited brain. Its thoughts were rapid, many aimed at escape, burrowing, and killing. She exerted her influence, and the thing twitched slightly. She could now feel it, in the back of her mind. She accessed it, and ordered it the creature to cease its struggle. It went still, craning itself to start at its new master. Kerrigan placed it on the ground, and it skittered away, pausing at the feet of Kestrel. Kerrigan crossed her arms and leaned back, a gesture so womanly and human that fir a moment, is was almost easy to forget she was the Queen of Blades, ruler of the Swarm.

"Very good, Kestrel. It appears when I succeed, I succeed big." She had been riding along in Kestrel's mind, and was impressed by how easily she grasped it. "Now, each of these larva contains a full set of genes for each and every species of Zerg that has been created. Go ahead, instruct it to mutate into a Drone." Emily prowled through her larva's coding, located the strand for the drone, and activated it. The larva immediately coated itself in a cocoon which throbbed and pulsed with the life inside of it. After a minute, it burst from the cocoon, a crab like thing with little pseudo wings running along it's sides. The wings and segments of its limited armor were deep green.

'You can see that this Drone bears your spore, and the coloration that belongs to your Brood. Drones are the backbone of the Hive cluster. They contain the DNA of all of the structures that we use in the process of breeding more Zerg. Pick a location in this expanse, and have it evolve into your hatchery." Kestrel looked around. The plain they were standing on was a simple shelf of rocky ground sitting high enough up that lava flows were not needed to be worried about. She chose a spot several meters from where she stood, and gave the command. Then Drone grunted, and began to evolve, spreading a dome membrane over itself and growing. She watched, fascinated as the domed incubator swelled and expanded, growing little by little into the Zerg structure.

As it grew, Kerrigan entered Emily's mind, imparting on the finer points of manufacturing her units. They stood motionless for half an hour, as Kerrigan dumped information directly into her subordinate, and Emily used it to start her Brood. When she finally shook her head to clear it, and became aware of her surroundings again, her hatchery had broken free, covered the ground around them with creep, and 6 more drones were engaged in collecting minerals and another was morphing into an extractor on a nearby geyser of Vespene gas.

"There you are. You will breed a combative force while maintaining and upgrading your Hive Cluster.. I have my own business to attend to, so you will be left under the , and then I will deploy you and we will test your ability to command. My business shall take me off world, and while I will contact you if I see fit, your own bond has not been forged significantly enough to. Allow you contact to me whenever you need." The Queen turned on her heel and returned to her Overlord, mounting it while it was still lowering itself. He voice continued in Emily's mind as she rose toward a giant shape obscured by Smokey clouds in the lower atmosphere.

_I will leave you in the capable hands of my Cerebrate, Roc. _She snapped the link and Kestrel continued to watch her as she vanished into the clouds.

_Greetings, Disciple Kestrel._ A voice echoed in her head. The voice had a damp, rotting slither to it, but it did not sound bad to Emily. _I am Cerebrate Roc, the oldest of our Queens allies._

_Greetings, Cerebrate. I was surprised to hear of your existence. The Dominion figures you were all destroyed._ The voice gave a dry chuckle, a sound like blood filled lungs hitching for breath.

_For the most part, it is true. All that survived the conflicts with the UED were slaughtered by Kerrigan. She severed my bond to the Overmind when it was first killed by the Protoss, as I had watched over her chrysalis during her transformation. I have remained loyal to her, and while she still believes in loyalty, I shall continue to live._

_A good think to know. What would you suggest I do next, Cerebrate?_ Kestrel asked the voice.

_I have a number exercises planned to help you develop your skill. I would suggest setting up spore and spine crawlers around the perimeter of your hive, along with a few Overlords on patrol. Having a number of quick reaction forces available would also be wise._ Emily set these up the portions she could while the Cerebrate spoke. If the Cerebrate had been commanding even before Kerrigan was ruling the Swarm, he was doubtless a resource to be taken advantage of. She would take his advice, and use what suited her. She would continue discussions with this creature long into the night, learning what she must do, refining her knowledge, honing her skill. She would be ready for whatever her Queen for her.

**End 2**

**Sorry if this is short and choppy. Just wanted to get into more of what a Disciple is, how the Zerg function, and what Kerrigan is.**

**Little bit of direction as I know a little of where I am going. Emily is not, NOT a consort. I am a solid Kerrigan/Raynor proponent. And... that is all I have for now. Gonna have a time jump a little in the next one.**

**Note: Also, I am going to try and do all the Mental dialogue in Italics with no quotes around them. If this his hard to understand, let me know, and I will work on it.**


	3. Directive

**Starcraft: Contingency**

**Disclaimer: I do Not own Starcraft.**

_**Warning: mild Spoilers for Heart of the Swarm contained herein. (published 3 days after it's U.S. release.)**_

**Chapter 3: Directive**

_-1 month after the Birth of Kestrel-_

She felt her almost as soon as she entered the system. Well, more accurately, that is when Kerrigan allowed her to be sensed. The Kestrel brood had swelled to over 4000 of the lesser Zerg types in the short month She had been away. Her personal Overload dropped her in front of her Disciple, and Kerrigan looked the woman over.

Kestrel had seen some rather rough times, but had come into her own due to them. Her carapace was gauged and scored, pockmarked, and burned in places by acid and fire. One of her elbow spines had broken off, and one of her left wing intermediary blades was in the middle of being re-grown. The visual marks of combat would vanish at her next shedding, but the experience that was gained would hold.

"Looks like you have been busy. Learn anything?" She smiled at her Queen.

"I have parasites." She responded happily. Kerrigan got a mental flash the explained the whole situation. Kestrel had evolved due to a random mutation, a small hollow under her right arm that held a barbed projectile that released a cloud of infestation parisites.

"Not normally something one would be excited to find out." Kerrigan mused.

"Yeah, but it saved my ass. I was out digging around in some of the old Protoss ruins when Roc staged an attack. Shot down my Overload, and I managed to hijack two of his Mutalisks and beat him back. Also, I can fly." She then sent a packet of this. A thin membrane would extend through her bony wing struts, enabling her to achieve enough lift to get airborne. She was still choppy at it, but she could steer with reasonable proficiency.

By sending all the relevant information via the burst of telekinetic packets, they saved hundreds of words and minutes of time.

"I trust that Roc did not go easy on you?" Kestrel snorted.

"If he was going easy on me, you might as well just eliminate me now, because I suck. Four out of five times I only pulled out alive by the skin of my teeth."

_I kept increasing the difficulty in a fair cure, my Queen. Your Disciple is fairly proficient, although her Psionic offenses are less that you were hoping for._ Roc projected so that both Emily and Kerrigan received, and Kerrigan radiated a pleased response.

"Very good. I have pulsed my hatcheries containing my newest crop, and two of the specimens in hatchery number 4 are still alive and ready to hatch. Come." The command was carrying a telepathic undercurrent that told Emily she was to use her own mount, which she quickly summoned and followed. They flew over the cracked earth, molten lakes, and creep covered valleys, over landscape Kestrel had not traversed during her month of tutelage. Unbeknownst to her, she had been hatched at site number 2, several kilometers to the northwest. Even before they landed, Kestrel could see the difference between the pods that held life, and the duds. The fact that each had been a human being did not bother her in the least. As an assassin for the confederacy, she had never had trouble rationalizing death.

The two live pods pulsed and bulged, a faint green-yellow glow seeming to silhouette the shadowy shape within. Kerrigan leapt and alighted softly upon the creep, and Kestrel followed, using her wings where her Psionics couldn't help. She walked up to behind Kerrigan, and they waited. As they did, Emily could feel the little blinks as Kerrigan's Brood began to encircle them, like it had been when she was born.

"I had my hopes that this crop would be better, because I added in the mutations you developed. If these two are viable, I should have enough mutations to improve my Brood Mothers to actual intelligences, rather than the just highly programmed lieutenants."

"And then phase me out?" Emily was a little worried. She had learned more than enough from Roc to know that, as a Zerg, the possibility of being liquidated when Kerrigan achieved her goals and you reached obsolescence was always a threat. He had stated that the only reason he himself was still alive was that Kerrigan still had the ghost of her human sentimentality. Kerrigan chuckled.

"If you can no longer serve your purpose, yes. But as my Cerebrate almost certainly mentioned as well, I can choose to reward those who merit it." She turned away as the left most chrysalis shuddered violently. It was not quite awake yet, but it was angry. Its unconditioned rage was so great that even Kestrel could feel the unconscious urge for violence radiating from the pod. The other living pod was empty of Psionic emissions. Not that is wasn't giving off special, telepathic waves, but that it was completely dead. But the creature inside was alive. It was blocking its brainwaves, even in its sleep.

Kerrigan knew what were to be her three disciples better then they themselves knew them. She had personally built them, coded the strains, wove the strands, selected their enhancements herself, rather than let her Evolution creature handle it. The one on the left was a former resocialized mass murderer and had been a Firebat for the Dominion when she had captured him. While he had no Psionic abilities, she had selected to maximize his physical prowess, and uninhibited his natural penchant for brutality. The one creating the dead spot had been a Dominion ghost, and his genetic coding had taken to the maximization of his Psionic abilities even better than her own, especially as she had her and Kestrel's maps to work from. What she ended up with was a form that was not really very human, but would develop into a powerful Psionic warrior who's abilities might even give her own pause. But She had Abathur incorporate the improved cognition strains into two of her Brood Mothers already. She would give one of the Disciples to Saixi, and the other to Cyrix. They would take them, train them, then give them one of the uncharted worlds outside of Dominion an Protoss space to seed their broods. Kerrigan would be handling Kestrel herself.

Kestrel was perfect for what Kerrigan needed. She had already been strong; having survived the initial... inexperienced manipulations she had made, and the viability of her mapping showed that. She wasn't to powerfully Psionic, she would most likely peek as a PI rating of 9 if she were lucky, but still had the neural framework to support her brood. But mostly, her temperament and psychological profile were well suited. She did not shy from the slaughter, was powerful, but did not seek power, and was slightly subservient, but not excessively so by nature. One subtle factor that played to Kerrigan's subtle brand of manipulation in this matter, was the fact that in her Terran life, Kestrel had been a lesbian. It made her susceptible to more direct and undetectable manipulation through pheromones, body language, and Kerrigan's own wiles. She would be able to control her Disciple without her know she was being controlled, and more importantly, without being directly hooked into her control complex.

Kerrigan had been feeling a... something... in her head back as far as she could remember after defeating the Overmind. It was faint. She only felt it in the deepest part of her sleep. It was insubstantial, like a fog drifting in her head, a far off whisper of ill that was more a feeling than a sound. It was always just that, a whisper like a breeze over a sea black. But it chilled her to her core, and woke her in unease. She thought this must have been what she had put Jim through when she had first been cocooned, and had to bite back a bitter chuckle the burned at her insides.

It had gotten stronger recently, and the whisper had almost been a sound that she could sense. Something in her mind connected it with the Overmind, and she returned to the broken surface of Auir to inspect the rotting hulk. The feral Zerg did not bother her, and she made no motion to reclaim them. She tapped into one of the Overminds Nerve tendrils. At first, she just got feelings, unrelated to any timeline. Victory, joy, hunger, and death. She pushed deeper.

She was looking at herself, long, orange hair flowing around the mask of her Ghost face mask, pushed up on her forehead as she killed a Protoss Zealot that was assaulting the Zerg's Hive growing on Tarsonis. She was looking through the eyes of a Hydralisk, and it recognized her form back when she was performing experiments on the Zerg for the confederates, because she could Psionicly affect their control. She watched as waves of Zerg swept through the area, frenzied by the Psi emitter, slaughtering everything. She was getting the blanket input the Overmind had gotten that day, but localized to thoughts that concerned herself.

She got a radio feed from the helmet of an infested terran, which detailed the exchange where James Raynor broke off from Mengsk after her abandoned her to the swarm, and Jim led a futile assault to extract her before he was forced to pull back. As she burned with rage over this, the feral Zerg nearby cowered and fled from the force of the emotion in the intruder upon their territory.

She then watched as she was protected by the Cerebrate as she incubated, and the whole of her life with the Zerg to the death of the Overmind, but from _its_ perspective. It was overjoyed the entire time, positively thrilled when it was finally defeated. The thought, _freedom¸_ came with the death, and she did not understand. But she had felt something that chilled her, though she didn't know anything but it was connected with her. There was a burning rage within the Overmind, fiercer than anything she had ever felt before. But rather that get soothed as the Overmind consumed and assimilated and destroyed, it built. It viewed her as something greater than itself, and its tool in orchestrating its death. She was abruptly cut off from the dead consciousness, and could get nothing else. But it left her with a foreboding, and that night, when the whispered voice drifted over the void, she had felt it as an enemy, a subjugator, a corruptor, and she knew it was not the Overmind whispering to her from beyond the grave, but something terrible.

The pod on the left shuddered again, and exploded, while the one on the right sighed softly and drained. The Disciples were born, and their Queen was ready to greet them.

(...)

Emily watched as the first form exploded out of its cocoon, and landed, standing upon the creep. What she saw was interesting, to say the least. The figure was 7 or more feet tall, heavily muscled, and a dark brown. It looked as if someone had taken a giant and skinned it to reveal its musculature. They then amplified the muscle mass to at least twice the bulk of an average human, and painted the whole thing brown. Plating had then been added to the ankles, shins, waist, back, and forearms and elbows. Kerrigan and Kestrel both retained the air of humanity in their chiseled features, but this... it looked like a giant lizard. The head was bald the nose flat and nostrils were slits, the chin was a swirl of bone and teeth, and the eyes were blood red with silver slits for pupils. A long, thick tail with a hooked blade at the tip tore gouges from the creep as it flicked. The hands and feet both ended in massive, bone reinforced talons, that dripped with an oily liquid that looked poisonous even from a distance. It opened it's mouth an hissed a low, threatening tone at the pair, its lower jaw parting into five separate mandibles that jointed together when not hissing.

For the first time since she had become a Zerg, Emily was disgusted by what she saw. While she knew she did not sit very high up the morality ladder herself, she now knew what real evil looked like when given shape. Whatever this thing was now, it had not been human long before it was assimilated into the swarm.

With a blur of movement it charged. On its elbows, hooked plating formed a spire like on Emily's own, but instead of pointing up along the back of the arm like hers, these hung low and oriented toward the wrist. Twin blades of bone grew from these spines, sliding along the bottom of his forearms, ending about two feet past the tip of his fingers in arm length bone swords. With a thought, Kerrigan froze him, the Psionic sheaf glowing faintly as the monster strained against his incorporeal bonds. His eyes burned with rage at this.

"Do you wish to continue your existence?" She whispered, all smooth, cold death. The lizard man's eyes burned fiercer as he matched her yellow eyed gaze. They stared for a long minute, and finally the beast eyes averted.

"Yes." It gave ion a hissing, dangerous whisper. Without moving a muscle, Kerrigan compressed the Psi Field slightly.

"Yes what?"

Yes...my... ... queen." He said, like each word was being forcibly pulled from him. She released him, and his body seemed to sag as his bone blades fell to the ground. "Remember that pain. Serve me well, and I will show you true power." The burning hate in his eyes did not dim, but there was a hint of respect in them now.

"Come out." She now said, looking at the direction where the second pod had deflated. There was a hesitation of maybe three seconds, and then the final Disciple faded into being.

It looked at first as if a man were standing atop a giant spider, but that was quickly replaced as Emily's eyes adjusted to what it really was. The lower half of the creature was the body of an enormous spider, 8 thing legs holding its belly a few feet above the creep. From the front of this, the elongated torso of a man stretched up like a madman's vision of a centaur. The entire creature stood, at extension, feet tall, and was pale, opaque white. Blotches of black pigment swirled around the chitin all over the body, accompanied by millions of tiny, wiry hairs.

The torso was grossly extended, but still held a kind of fragile, spindly beauty to it. Two long, thin arms descended down and ended with long, needle like fingers with little knots of flesh at the joints. His face was the real interesting part of him, and that was saying something. He had been wearing his Ghost head gear while he had been incubating, and it had grown into his face. The glowing blue "eyes" that dotted his face were originally sophisticated detection lenses were now his actual eyes, blinking and picking up several different images. The diamond shaped breather that had been the front of his mask opened vertically, showing rows of jagged needle like teeth as he spoke two faint words.

"I serve." He held his hands steepled in front of him. And then Kerrigan took a step forward and began her speech. Emily took the time while she did so to continue making observations on the newcomers, tweak the production orders to her brood, incorporate one of the new strains that Kerrigan had opened now that the genes of these newcomers were allotted, and check her Brood. 6000 of a mix of Zerglings, Hydralisks, Mutalisks, and Roaches, with another 2000 Drones and enough Overloards to blanket her complete territory. Roc said it was respectable, but not to too numerous, which she properly interpreted as "get those numbers up."

Kerrigan stepped back and crossed her arms. "Now, kill." Zerg swarmed at the newcomers. The reptilian one charged, his blades popping in their groves anew and cleaving through the Zerg like they were wet paper. When he reached the end of the line of Zerglings, he kept going, diving into the ring of other Zerg in a frenzy of blood and shattered bone.

The second, spider type guy worked his needle like fingers in intricate, rapid movements. As the First Zergling came in close, he jerked his hand, and suddenly it was encased in a hair thing web. He continued with little jerking movements, and then the other 7 became trapped in their own matching silk cages. He lifted a hand suddenly, fingers pointed up, griping a single thread of the filiment, and began winding it like a loom. The webs enclosing the Zerg began the shrink. He held up his other hand, the tip of the finger a dot of blue light, and touched the thread, which glowed as the finger was applied. The webbing began to melt through the Zerglings armor as it contracted, glowing blue material running as the armor melted, until they ceased struggling. He stopped spinning, cut the thread, and sat back on his legs, waiting.

Kerrigan smile, pleased that her reading of the strains had been as she thought. The proof was in the way each had handled this. Kestrel had simply reacted to the threats as they came, While the lizard one had gone full violence, and was still tearing through her spares in indiscriminant violence. The last sat and waited, not moving, but even though he was not broadcasting thought waves, she knew he was ready for whatever was thrown at him. She signaled the brood to halt and retreat. They burrowed, and the four were alone, the reptilian humanoid returning to the general area where Kerrigan stood.

"Very good." She said softly, directing a bit of menace toward the lizard, who finally halted his progress at the memory of the pain she had inflicted when he had last resisted. "You have proven, for now, your fitness to become part of the Swarm. From the ground to either side of Kerrigan, a new creature burrowed up from underground.

"Basilisk," she said, looking straight into the eyes of the lizard, " Saixi will be responsible for your training. You will go with her, and learn from her how to lead the Zerg." The brrof mother stepped forward, told Basilisk to follow, and burrowed again. Basilisk followed after casting one more death glare at Emily and the Queen.

"Recluse," She looked to the spider, "Cyrix will be your instructor." The spider nodded, said nothing, and trundled after the Brood Mother. The remainder of her Zerg again burrowed above the surface again, and immediately started tearing apart the remaining structures and eggs.

"And finally, Kestrel." She turned to face her, a slightly predatory grin on her lips. "I will undertake your instruction in command myself." Kerrigan held out her hand and Kestrel, pleased by not only by the personal attention, but the preferential treatment to the others, took it, and Kerrigan lead her off to gather her brood.

**End 3.**

**Alright, then. I just finished Heart of the Swarm (awesome) and that gave me a slight inkling on, if nothing else, where I cannot go. Next part is going to be a significant time jump from here, now that I have introduced Basilisk, Recluse, and a bit more of the scheming nature behind the "Queen of blades" Kerrigan. Also to note, from here on, there will be sporadic SPOILERS for HEART OF THE SWARM, especially two or three installments from now, when I think I will be getting into that territory, which, as it is the Kerrigan chapter of the whole series, is where I want my Story of the Swarm to focus.**

**Note: Thanks for the review, people, I appreciate the feedback, I really do. I hope I can keep you entertained.**


	4. Willow

**Starcraft: Contingency**

**Disclaimer: I do Not own Starcraft.**

_**Warning: mild Spoilers for Heart of the Swarm contained herein.**_

**Chapter 4: Willow**

_-2 years after the end of the Brood War, 2 years before Wings of Liberty-_

Kestrel stood atop her Overlord, looking out at the small human settlement across the grassy field. She had evolved a fair deal since her death and rebirth, a year ago. He claws and mind were sharper, she had developed minor telekinetic abilities, she could fly, dominate other sentient creatures with her parasites, and her brood consisted of over 8 million fighting units under herself and 2 Brood Mothers. Her Main hive cluster was buried in the caves beneath one of the planet Bliss's mountains, safe from the Dominion sensors, Protoss scouts, and even her the prying sensors of her fellow Disciple, Basilisk. 12 other secondary hives were dotted about the northern pole, and life was good. She had picked off many of the fringe sensors stations that the Dominion had established, and this far out into the rim space, it was highly doubtful that heavy reinforcement would be an issue.

When Kerrigan had taken her and her Zerg upon a Leviathan, erasing her brood from Char, they had jumped to this little, moderately settled planet far enough outside of Dominion space that it was unlikely that Mengsk would care if reports of Zerg reached him. She helped her setup her Primary Hive cluster in some caves under a mountain in near the northern pole of the planet, get her evolution creature spawned, teach her to create Brood mothers. Then, when her first Brood Mother was formed, and placed in command, Kerrigan took her to a string of planets to combat Protoss and Dominion forces and hone her leadership skills and refine her link with her Brood.

That was nice, but what Emily really enjoyed was the personal time she got to spend with her Queen. Sure, she still remembered the news images of her, ripping through defenses and slaughtering soldiers. She could remember the chill down her spine whenever the unit she was attached to was on the same planet as her personally. But now... now what she saw a powerful and lonely woman. During the times that they would talk, it was almost possible to forget that they were Zerg. Emily did still could not be sure if her affection to her Queen was genuinely her own, or a side effect of the Zergification process, bur she decided she didn't care. If nothing else, she thought it was real, because she doubted if it was the adoration that the common Zerg held for her would feel as... human as her own affection.

She pushed those thoughts out of her head with effort, but the warm glow remained as she looked at the walled village. She had been given her mission: Build the Brood. Her whole objective was to consume the planet, and grow her swarm as big as she could. Kerrigan had confided with her in a particularly tender exchange they had one night that she could feel something out there, somewhere, and she wanted as many cards up her sleeve as she could get. And now she was off somewhere, hunting for information, seeding other planets, checking on the progress of the other Disciples, or whatever it was she did when she was off Char. Emily did not expect to see her again unless she was testing her, or something changed. She liked to think that Kerrigan liked her like she liked Kerrigan, but she wanted to keep herself out of their presence as much as possible. She didn't say why she wanted these independent Broods, especially seeing as it was so un-Zerg to be against the Unity of the Hive, but Kestrel could sense it was important so she did not complain. Besides, it looked like she could have fun with this. She had burrowed a force of Zerglings and Roaches around the perimeter, and had a Infestor poised to infiltrate. To her pleasant surprise, there were no detector devices within the small agrarian village. Her wings arced and flapped in her excitement. She ordered her overlord forward, and the Hydralisks arrayed below surged forward as well.

The people in the town had seen the Zerg massing, and the Dominion marines that had been located to the area to quell the rebellious farmers were mounted on the wall, waiting. She stopped just outside the range of their guns, and walked forward, psionically increasing the projection of her voice so that the entire town could hear her.

"Attention, Terran. You are currently inhabitation of this world, which belongs to the Swarm. Renounce the Dominion, throw down your arms, and you will not be harmed. Resist, and be consume... shit!" Emily cried as the shot from the cloaked Ghost's Canister Rifle tore through her left shoulder and she pitched sideways off her overloard. The Hydralisks swirled and caught her, forming a screen as they retreated out of range of this new foe. Emily fumed as she jammed her hand to the wound; the hole punched clean through and would take a few day to fully recover. Mostly she was pissed at her own arrogance. She had assumed that she had been under the radar, but if they were ready for her, she must have screwed up somewhere.

She ordered the Zerglings and Roaches to tunnel under the wall opposite wall where she was, sweeping the area and killing anything with a gun. She wanted the civilians herded inside and safe for the most part. She knew that the population was not happy with the Dominion, and she wanted to question some of the locals to see just how much information could be provided. Still possessing her human sympathies, she was wary of just slaughtering the innocents wholesale. It took about 3 minutes before those on the wall noticed the commotion that was growing behind them, and turned to engage the new enemy, whereas Emily had her Zerg charge. The Hydralisks's claws shortly had a a sizable hole broken into the wall, and poured into the town.

"Kill the soldiers, leave the Ghost to me." She said, out of habit, as the Zerg did not need verbal commands. The Hydralisks fanned out and joined their Brood mates in the slaughter. There had only been at max, 40 marines stationed here, and already she could account for 25. She stretched her perception to try and detect her adversary's mind while he was cloaked, but did not hold much hope of that. She walked between the metal, prefab buildings, feeling for the Ghost, listening through her Zerg for the telltale suppressed shots, and giving more complex orders to Zerg that needed to take on more well defended groups. Most of the civilians seemed to be trying to fight, which she could understand, even though it meant death. She got an ipression that a few people were hiding out in a domed building, and she tasked a few Zerglings to keep an eye on it. She pasted a dying marine broken and bleeding on the ground, and with a sharp jab from her outermost wing tip, put him out of his misery. The last 10 or so troops had a fortified position, and were holding fairly well. She began to walk that way, when the Ghost attacked.

She detected him a scant half second before he struck, and as a result, the knife he drove home as he slammed against her lodged in her shoulder blade rather than an organ. Emily roared with rage more than pain, and tried to flap her wing and rip the person into bits, but the man ha slapped some sort of metal cuff on them, pinning them shut. Working her hands quickly under her, she shoved as hard as she could, propelling the two into the air, and disloging him enough that she could span as slash at him with her claws. The tips of the her talons tore through his EVA suit, bringing thin lines of scarlett out, but doing no real damage. She tried to flap her wings to give her balance, but failed and crashed to the ground before quickly righting herself. She eyed her attacker, who stood ready, knife in hand.

She brought her wing forward, clasp the metal band, and tore the device off, using the tip of her open wing to slice through the other. She sent a quick command to her Evoltion creature to find her a strain that would sharpen the outside edge of her wings, so she could prevent this sort of attack in the future.

"I will enjoy disemboweling you, human." She spat, her wings twitching and flexing, now that they were free.

"You are not the Queen of Blades." He said, and she felt his arrogant smile, even through his face was masked.

"No, I am not." She dashed, swiping with her claws as the Ghost dodged and faced at the same time. With her other hand, she grabbed into the soil, using her momentum to spin upon her hand as the axis of rotation, her back facing straight up, and wings spread to full extentsion as she twirled like a giant, flat saw. She felt the slight hesitation and shower of warm blood as she caught him and sliced him clean in half. She stood, and walked to where the top half of the body lay, bleeding into the dirt.

"She would have made you suffer." Continued, then lifted her foot and stopped his skull. She flexed her shoulders back, then reached back and pulled the knife that had lodged there. She was mad at herself for how bad she was doing at this, but she vowed to never let herself be to overconfident again. She moved her Hydralisks in, controlled one herself until it was killed, and then sent the remaining Zerg to start destroying buildings and devouring the corpses. She wanted the settlement to be nothing but a burned patch of ground. She stalked toward the building that held the non hostiles, her right hand floating to press against her shoulder wound. She was suddenly tired.

She rapped on the metal door hard with her left fist.

"Come out and I shall let you live." She heard a scuffling inside the structure, a clunck, and then the door opened just enough for a person to be thrown out of. Emily looked down in surprise at the person now cowering at her feet, her arm still hanging in the air as if to knock.. The slender woman at her feet crawled back to the door, whimpering and pounding weakly to get back in. Emily was so shocked she just stood and stared for a minute, until a voice muffled by the door pulled her back.

"There, she came out, now leave us alone." Emily momentarily lost herself. Her eyes flashed a deeper green, and matching colored smoke curled from the corners of them. Her fist clenched and her wings spasmed in her rage. She reached down, grabbed the woman's arm, and lifted her and pulled her back, setting her down away from the house. Four of her Hydralisks moved in an prevented her from fleeing. Then she rounded back to the building, lowering her hand from her shoulder, she cocked back her hands, and drove he talons into the metal of the door. She pulled and ripped the door off of its hinges and flung it aside like it was nothing. She clenched her shaking fists and entered. Twenty seconds later, she exited, her wings dripping gore, and her hand again clapped over her shoulder. She was tired, and her injuries flared with pain as the rage washed out of her.

"Bring her." She said at the Hydralisks, and the buffeted the young woman until she stood, terrified and shaking, and Emily summoned her overlord, and followed her prisoner inside before releasing her Hydralisks to help raze the town.

(...)

Emily sat back against the wall of the Overlord's open spaces, her hand still pressed to her shoulder, eyes closed. She was tired, and surprisingly nervous. She hadn't spoken, other than taunts and threats, to another real human in over a year, and the pitiful, terrified thoughts the woman radiated made her hesitant. She had calmed slightly, and was simply sobbing in the corner now. Emily followed along with the Zerg she left on the ground, destroying the last remnants of the buildings, then having the forces retreat to a safe distance an burrow. The location was far enough from her other hives that it would easily make a target if she started generating structures there. She would keep it under observation, but not incorporate it yet.

"Are you going to kill me?" The female's voice snapped Emily back to her physical senses. She did not open her eyes.

"Not unless you do something stupid." She replied airily.

"Are you going to... experiment on me?" Kestrel caught the thoughts as they rolled off the girl. She had no defense against a Teep, so the if Emily did not want to catch these surface thoughts, she would have had to block them herself. She got the scattered memories of new stories talking about captured people, settlements disappearing, and infested terrans.

"I am not." She stated firmly, thinking she would not, even if she had the capabilities to do so.

"Then... why take me?" Emily finally opened her eyes, and looked at the human girl. She was blond, her hair tied back into a simple knot. She had a splash of freckles across her face, and pale blue eyes that were bloodshot and frightened. She continued to her examine her thin frame and small assets with an eye that hadn't forgotten how nice a female figure could look.

"I have questions about this world, and intelligence gathering is not one of the strengths of the Swarm." The woman's mind raced as she tried to think of why she would abducted for information.

"I... I don't know anything."

"You have lived her long?"

"All my life." She answered cautiously.

"Then you know subtle things that may prove of value." She closed her eyes again, slightly embarrassed because she had been caught checking the woman out.

"Why did you not take one of the community leaders or soldiers then? Surely they would be of more help then I. I am... no one." Emily could feel that this was not her trying to barter for her life. She really believed she was of no value.

"Why were the other... people," she spit the word " so eager to cast you out?" If anything, she seemed ashamed of this.

"When the Dominion started setting up in this system, they began requisitioning locals to perform menial tasks. I was a conscripted assistant at one of their field labs. When they moved here, I was taken along, and the people in town were not really understanding of my position."

"And the tossed you out to me for that?"

"Yes. Once that it was seen that the Zerg were bypassing non-dominion persons that were not actively engaging with your Zerg, The Dominion started arming us and making us fight with them. So they probably thought you would spare them if the tossed out me." Emily snorted.

"It seems humans will never cease to disgust me."

"When you have the information you can get, what will you do with me?" Emily opened her eyes and looked puzzled.

"I actually had not thought ahead that far." She tapped her chin with a finger. "I suppose the standard procedure would be to kill you... but... that doesn't really appeal to me. I would imagine that that does not appeal to you, either."

"Not particularly." She said, still scared but trying not to break down. Emily admired that.

"I'll tell you what. You answer all my questions, don't do anything stupid, and we'll see what happens, yeah?"

"Okay." She said shakily.

"Good. What's your name?"

"Willow. Willow Sinclair."

"Nice to meet you, Willow. You may call me Kestrel."

(...)

Willow Sinclair sat at the candlelit wooden table in the house of the Mayor of the town of Jorgonson. She had entered the town less than an hour ago, and had been taken to the Mayor as soon as she could locate someone who had the authority to present her. His eyes were still pouchy from the sleep he was in the middle of when she arrived He looked the intruder over. She was blonde, pretty, and thin. She wore a white bodysuit with grey trim and heavy hiking boots. Her hair was tied into a simple knot. She had the look of a tech, but her hands had the look of the country about them.

"I am sorry to wake you, Mr. Gardner." The man grunted and took a drink of the coffee in front of him.

"It must be important, to have me woken in the middle of the night."

"Yes sir. The Zerg are coming."

"I could have told you that. We've had a inflow of Dominion survivors for days now, most half dead. And reports from the other settlements are similar. I assume you are a refugee as well?"

"No. I speak on behalf of the Swarm." There was a tight, stretched silence as the older man stared at her in incredulity. Willow smiled faintly, and placed a datapad on the table, attaching a small holo-projector to it. She tapped a series of commands onto it with a stylus and the little projector warmed to a cool blue light.

"What the hell are you talking about?" The Mayor finally managed to say. Willow toggled a few more buttons on her datapad, and a small image of the planet appeared, with the north pole to about half the distance to the equator glowing in green, with the rest blanketed in a patchwork of red and blue. Little teeth of red were biting into the green in places.

"As you can see, the Brood has already secured all the territory to the north of this point, and have the Dominions last outpost here, here, and here secured shortly." She then indicated a blue dot located a short way from the green frontline, tapping her stylus and displaying it's name: Jorgonson. "And with your town will be one of the next to be consumed." The woman sat back, crossing her arms and looking impassively around the room.

"But... Why? Why us? We are no threat to the Zerg. Why can they not just leave us alone?"

"Because the Swarm expands, evolves. This planet is claimed for the Swarm. But the Brood here does not strictly bear hostility toward the terrans here." She leaned forward, and tented her hands, half her face hidden in shadow.

"So you threaten us to get us to leave?" He was mad. The threat of the Zerg was nothing they could withstand, but this damned girl, likely Dominion herself, from the look of her, was trying to extort him out off his home with the threat of them!

"Not at all, Sir." She responded calmly, used to such reactions. "If you were alive during the last war, you know the Zerg will consume anything in their path. What my Mistress is doing, is allowing you a chance to prevent the deaths of all the people of this settlement. Three days from now, her Brood shall move into this area, and any opposition will be destroyed. I have been sent ahead to give you enough warning to evacuate your people, like many have chosen to do." She let it hang, as she clearly had more to say, but wanted to be prompted.

"And if we refuse to leave our homes?" She seemed to smile slightly in the flickering light.

"Then you will be devoured by the Zerg, or conform to their rules and be allowed to stay." HE looked at her warily, not sure she was being serious.

"And what would that entail?"

"Well, my Mistress would have to give you the full details, of course. But basically, as long as you take no hostile actions or preparations against the Zerg. You do not harbor and Dominion Armed forces. No travel or communication to any world not under the sway of my Mistresses Brood. Other than some other, simple changes that may be made in the future, you will be able to continue your lives pretty much as they are." The Mayor scratched his beard as hee though about this. The offer was so good as to be impossible. And while this could be a trick, he could not see what benefit this person would get from lying. He himself had seen Zerg on the planet a mere month ago when he was visiting some friends up north.

"If... if this is genuine, it's a little hard to believe." The woman smiled clearly this time.

"I know. Had you told me three months ago that the Zerg would have taken over this planet, and not only not be killing every human in sight, but would be coexisting peacefully with those who made an effort, I would not have believed it myself."

"How do I know you are not infested, and this is all a trap to get us to lay down without a fight?"

"A valid concern, and one I cannot quell if you do not trust that I am not. All I can offer is the fact that the Zerg care not for losses incurred to their population. So, no offence, but the elimination of the settlement will be a fact regardless.

"As a point of clarification, what if I called in and alerted the Dominion garrisons about your strike plan?" She looked at him for a silent moment.

"Kestrel will like you. You think of the angles. If such a thing were to happen, she would personally carve your bones from your body. She tries to be tolerant, but doles out punishment to those who merit it. I have personally seen this." She killed her holo-projector and tucked it away, lifting her datapad and standing, pushing in her chair.

"A parting bit. You do not have to decide today. But talk to your people, and find out the general consensus. At this time two days from now, I or one of my associates will return for your answer. Any who do not wish to obey are welcome to leave, and will not be harmed so far as they take no action against the Zerg." She smiled down at the tired looking man.

"If I may add a personal sentiment. I urge you to accept the offer. Kestrel does not work through infestation of civilian units as she finds this distasteful, so you would retain all your anonymity, and allowed free passage between any of the other colonies we have assimilated into the Brood. From what I have heard from the other towns and cities and farms we have acquired, our matron and her Brood Mothers, now that they are properly conditioned to work with terrans, is that her "government" is a far sight less oppressive than the Dominion." She made on handed air quotes around the word. She then reached behind her and pulled out an envelope, placing it in front of the man.

"Also, I was asked by an man who said he was a friend of yours, from one of the colonies we assumed a few weeks ago. Well, I hope you choose t join us, Mr. Gardner, and if you don't, I wish you the best of luck. I will bid you goodnight." She crossed her arms over her chest, clutching her tablet, and bowed at the waist before turning to the door.

Gardner looked at the letter, and read the name written on it. It was from the friend he had been visiting when he had seen the Zerg.

"Who are you?" He said to the girls back as she started out the door. She turned and flashed a smile, her white teeth reflecting the light.

"My name is Miss Willow Sinclair, Terran Liaison to Kestrel, Disciple of the Queen of Blades." And then she was gone, leaving him with the most important decision he would ever have to make. He swore lightly, then a few more times with growing emotion, then sighed. He put out the candles, and went to bed, but doubted he would be able to sleep for the next...3 or 4 days.

**End 4.**

**I would like to address the concerns, (and Thank, mostly thank) Scarlet-Sea reviewed with.**

**After this next chapter (5) I will be doing more heavy work with Kerrigan Personally, as I plan to start the chapter (6) at the same time as the end of Wings of Liberty. I loved "Heart of the Swarm" Kerrigan, and am anxious to work with her. Plus, it will make it all the more interesting when they meet again with HOTS Kerrigan, after more than 3 years of being apart. I am going to try for a contrast of the Human/Zerg dynamic, and how the two blend/fight each other.**

**But regardless, thanks again guys, for reading, and I'll try and have more by the end of the week.**


	5. Unlikely Allies

**Starcraft: Contingency**

**Disclaimer: I do Not own Starcraft.**

_**Warning: mild Spoilers for Heart of the Swarm contained herein.**_

**Chapter 5: Unlikely Allies**

_-1 year prior to the start of Wings Of Liberty-_

General Vincent Williams leaned back against the tread housing of the siege tank directly behind him, puffing on a cigarette and letting his mind drift. A Zergling milling about the area caught a strong blast of the pungent smoke, and scampered off to clearer air.

To say he had led an odd career would be a bit of an understatement. He had originally come to the Koprulu sector as a Lieutenant in the EUD's ill fated task force sent to stabilize the sector. He had earned a few promotions, and ended his contract a little early when it became clear that the situation was FUBAR. So he sold himself out to a little mercenary work, and pretty soon had his own outfit going operating on the edge of Dominion space. Things went great for a few years, and then on day, he and his troops were working the rounds, doing security on a research op with some little science team, when they had been surrounded on all sides by Zerg. The Zerg. They reminded him of the Army ants they had back home. Blind carpets of teeth that swept across anything in their path and devoured it, without emotion or any regard for the individual units. All that mattered was their swarm, and their queen.

But instead of rolling over and consuming them, a fricking blonde girl had come up, and offered to allow them join the Brood if they preferred that to death. Now, months later, he found himself a general, and head of all the Terran military forces of the brood, answering just to that little blonde, and the broods leader. He saw her around often, walking along with the blonde, petting the Zerg, flexing her bladed wings. She did not talk to any of his men directly, instead passing instructions through her intermediary, Willow. But when her instructions were disobeyed, she handled the punishments personally. It was not pretty. But he had seen his standard of living improve under her, and from what he gathered from talking to the other people he had met living on the swarms planets, it beat the hell out of the dominions crushing boot and lack of care.

Why they weren't all infested zombies he could not say, but for his money, it was ok not knowing. If the Zerg were going to start offering to be friends instead, that was okay for him. Rumors were that their leader, Kestrel, was actually part human under her Zerg skin, but he didn't buy it. She may look slightly human, but so did the Protoss, and they were far from it. Whatever the reason that the Zerg were suddenly allowing humans to live, he was content to do what it took to keep himself from falling from favor. His radio gave a burp of static and Willows voice came over his headset.

"General? Kestrel's going to stir them up, get your artillery ready to fire." He crushed out his cigarette on the tanks wall, and slapped the metal.

"Oy, you worthless curs, mount up and get ready. Time for a little revenge for our friends in the Zerus colony!"

(...)

Kestrel could feel the Protoss in the defile below her. It had taken a month of hunting, but she had found them. She had had no experience with the aliens before her transformation, and only their deaths during her tutelage with Kerrigan. She had of course known that they had some settlements in the outer planets, just as her Zerg and the Terrans had, but she had thought that if she kept her distance, they would leave her in peace. Little packets of scouts and hit and run parties had started hitting her troops and outlying outposts 3 months prior, on the surface of her third expansion world. Bliss and Aster had already become dominated by her Zerg, and she had somewhere in the neighborhood of 400,000 Terrans who had agreed to her conditions and were living peacefully on them.

She knew Kerrigan would have just slaughtered everyone and called it a day, but it just did not feel right to Kestrel. Some hold over of her humanity still felt that the murder of innocent people was wrong, so she had developed this work around. Kerrigan's exact orders had been: "Expand the Swarm, make it strong. The territory you capture is yours to do as you please, but be ready if I need you." Nothing in there about slaying the farmers and prospectors and whatever else she found out here. Besides, if she objected when next she checked in, she could always just kill them all then, guilt free, having given them an extra few years on their lives.

She had actually convinced herself that she was making a sound strategic decision about it, and was not just being driven by her human conscience. She had known that the Dominion had detectors that could detect the presence of infested material, and by having loyal humans under her command, she could infiltrate some Dominion instillations without setting off any alarms.

It was all flimsy justifications, sure, but she had finally just decided she would do as she pleased until her Queen told her otherwise.

But the Protoss here, a segment of the Tal'darim, had pissed her off. Last month they had made one of her terran settlements on Neograd into a crater. One she new for a fact had never once even been brushed by any Zerg. She had set out and begun a full war on the Protoss on the planet, finally pushing them back to their last two cities located in the Twilight Valley about 400 kilometers south of the equatorial deserts. And odd alignment with the planets magnetic field lines created a reflective plate in the planets upper atmosphere, casting the whole region of the surface in perpetual twilight. The white sands and jagged cliffs made the area look pretty, minerals in the sand glittering as human lights caught them, like a blanket of gems. But she was going to coat the cools sands in the blood of her enemies. She stood on a slight rise, looking out over the broad sweep of pale sand to the glittering spires, pyramids, and arches of the Protoss settlements.

In front of her, more than three hundred Zelots and a handful of templar, a hundred or so Stalkers, a dozen archons and Immortals, and a pair of carriers floating serenely over the city. She could not see them, but she knew the Observers were out there as well, cloaked and buzzing about like flies. In the open ground with their ranged superiority, she could throw hundreds upon hundreds of Zerg at them, and would do very little damage. And with their detectors keeping her burrowed units at bay, and Sentry drones providing defenses and choke points, she figured she would lose 30+ Zerg to every Protoss. Not that it would break her, but she would require reinforcements and that would give the bastards time to summon more themselves, and possibly push her defenders back. So she would play the card the arrogant aliens weren't expecting. The Siege Tank card.

Emily had loved Siege tanks when she had been a human. She remembered she had worked with an artillery unit in her first deployment against the Zerg, helping some marines keep the line back so the tanks could pound the front lines with their terrifying firepower. The explosions from the tanks shell liquefied the Zerg in the blast area, killing what seemed like dozens of the surging creatures with each shot, raining blood and bone and dirt 30, 40 feet away. She loved and believed in her Zerg, but she was defiantly glad to have 6 of the Tanks set up behind the rise with clear fields of fire below. All she had to do was get the Protoss close enough, and they would get one hell of a shock.

She summoned her Hydralisks to her, having them spread in a line while still burrowed along the length of the 2 foot high sandy berm, ready to rise and spray their deadly spines down when the Protoss came in range. What she knew of the Protoss told her they would continue the charge once they began to explode rather than retreat, and she wanted as many down as possible before she joined the fight, and figured a wall of needles would do it.

She liked the versatility of the Hydralisks more than she had looked the Siege tanks, even. Even when she was a human, she had respected the pure beautiful killing machines the Hydralisks were. She had her Evolution creature, Abelard, toy with the strains on them, creating a heavier, larger, more powerfully muscled version of the creature she kept around as her personal guard. She stroked one as it slithered up next to her, pressing its fringed skulled into her hand like an eager puppy made of murder. She called them Hunter-Killers, and they could take a lot heavier damage than normal Hydralisks, and their spines had better penetration and range, at the expense of the number fired in each volley. She had heard them called "Sniper-lisks" by Willow, and thought it was an apt name, given that she would trust her pet's aim to at least the distance of a good quality Canister Rifle. Her pet hissed at the distant Protoss, and she could feel its blood lust radiating from it.

Emily looked to her right as she tapped her finger absently on the Hunter-Killers bony skull. Willow stood next to her, tapping away on her datapad as she checked on the details the human troops were sending in. Emily was well aware of why she had chosen to spare this one, and it was an impulse far more base than her conscience, that was for sure. About three feet further south, to be exact. The girl was cute, attentive, and once she had gotten over her fear to a reasonable degree, had proven to be a good companion. The truth was, that once Kerrigan had left her to her business, Kestrel had gotten lonely. True, she loved her Zerg, and would not trade them for a Harem of the most beautiful and astute conversationalists in the galaxy. But she was still human enough to desire the company of others of her own kind, if in mind only.

And this made Emily's heart hurt for Kerrigan even more, as with her position, there could be no equal for her. She would be alone on her throne, a Queen without the possibility of a Queen of her own, (or King, she amended) to help her bear the burden. Emily thought that might be a contributing factor to the Queens burning fury, but she could not know for sure.

"Willow," she said, snapping away from her thoughts, " tell the General to ready himself, I am going attempt to draw the Templar into the kill zone." She had made it a point not to give orders to the human troops herself when possible. She talked with Willow, business on the field, intimately in private, because she liked her, and did not need to worry about the impression she needed to maintain with her. With the rest of the humans, she needed to remain a mysterious force that they could both respect and fear enough that they would remain disciplined. Plus, having Willow deliver the order built up her position and authority. She still pursued the less complicated rule of rule by her Zerg. As long as she was strong, and brought victory to the Brood, her Brood Mothers would follow her, or die trying to take the Brood from her. There had been a number of them that had tried this when she had first started allowing human settlements to be incorporated into the Hive, and their bodies fed the Creep.

_Eratha, are you ready?_ She sent to the Brood Mother she was grooming to take over this section of the planet when the threat was neutralized.

_Yes, my Mistress. We await your command._ Emily had puzzled over what her underlings would refer to her as in regards to her title, and settled on mistress as respectful, but not assuming. She had evolved herself since leaving Char. Hours of projections and work with Abelard in her pit on Bliss had allowed her to subtlety alter her physiology and grow new parts as she learned more about what she would encounter in her section of space. Her wings outermost flange was no longer a weak stalk of bone, but a thick, razor sharp crescent blade that could do some heavy damage to heavy armor and metal, and slice clean through lighter things. A thick, lifted plate had been grown along the outside edge of her left forearm, layered with bone and woven with tough, tissues and served to help her deflect blows from the Protoss Psi-blades. Other little tweaks she had made as well, sparely, because as Abelard was fond of telling her, complication of strains leads to complications, and changes affect balance of unit. The heavier bones in her wing blades, for instance would have necessitated a change in muscle densities, tendon strength and lengths, and several other minor factors. But they had a stockpile of minerals that could increase the strength of the bone without compromising weight, and she was able to upgrade without needing a complete redesign, which was not capable of anyway.

_Good. Wait for me to end the bombardment before you engage. _Emily mounted the berm, and slid smoothly down the side of the dune to the flat plain below with the Protoss arrayed in front of her like insects. Back on the top of the dune, Willow connected with the Adjutant in Kestrel's Command center and started providing target painting for each of the Six tanks waiting to hurl their ordinance down range. Emily could see him at the head of the procession, his blue robes and fancy metal standing out clearly. She picked out his mind, and transmitted directly to it, while speaking, knowing that his troops would be able to pick up the thoughts behind them, even from this distance.

"Awww... did the little Templar finally tire of running? I had expected you to flee all the way back to your final city before you would realize you cannot escape the swarm." She spoke like she was chastising a petulant child.

"Silence, Abomination." He replied, his regal voice full of distain, but deadly calm. "We of the Tal'darim know your kind speak only in lies and Heresy. We are the Firstborn of the Xel'Naga, charged with the holy task of wiping out the plague of your _race_ from the galaxy." For a creature without a mouth, he managed to spit the word as if it tasted foul. Emily brought her hands to her mouth, shocked.

"Oh!" she called in an over exagerated tone of malaise. "Is that what your purpose was? Well, then please excuse me." She gave a sweeping bow, her arms and wings gesturing in tandem. "Here, let me just settle down here and make this a little easier for you." She folded her wings into her back grooves, brought her knees to the sand, and sat on her legs, bowed as if in prayer. "There, go ahead, come, end my threat. Far be it from me to stand against the will of the gods." The templar laughed without mirth, and she could feel the rage at her mockery brimming underneath his voice.

"Foolish creature. You would believe that you could fool us with so simple a ploy." She looked up, locking her eyes on his glowing blue orbs.

"Of course not." She replied easily. "I need no ploys to finish your sorry forces off, Nylador. The whole of the galaxy knows your race is all but extinct." She rose, and took a step forward. "You lost your home world and greatest Hero to the Overmind, lost a second World and war to Kerrigan, and now will lose your life and the lives of all these people to me. And you can act all calm and controlled, sure, but you know the truth. I can see it in your head, the burden you bear. They are all going to die, and it is all your fault." She sunk to a seductive whisper at the last 3 words, her eyes glowing in the dim starscape. The Protoss did not reply, and she took that silence to mean she was getting to him.

"Oh yes, little Templar." She continued mirthfully in the same whisper. "We did not know you were out here, hiding in the sands. No, not until _you_ chose to destroy a perfectly innocent terran settlement, one I had not graved with the presence of my Zerg yet. Had you maintained your isolation, I would have ignored you, let you on about your business. I harbor no particular ill will against your people, Nylador, possibly as a holdover from my time as a human, so long ago." This much was true. She had seen the Protoss fight when she had been Emily Park, and she was in no hurry to engage in warfare with them now that she was different.

"Enough of your lies, parasite." The Protoss growled.

"Oh, no lies, Nylador. The truth is so very much more damning, in this instance. You attacked a perfectly clean and innocent settlement, and in doing so, have brought this holocaust down upon your people." She gave a small, slow chuckle. "How embarrassing it must be, to not only have less honor than a puppet of the Zerg, but to willingly have throw it away just to..."

"ENOUGH!" He mentally roared, his blades flaring to life along the backs of his hands. He pointed one of the blades at her. "I shall hack the deceitful head from your shoulders myself and smash your Swarm beneath my boots!" He charged, loping across the sand in large bounds, the rest of his warriors thundering after him. Kestrel smiled, her eyes glowing with pleasure as the enraged Protoss charged her, She braced her feet, set her wings ready, and waited. When he closed withing 15 meters of her, the warriors to his left and right exploded into orange fireballs and clouds of bone and blue blood. Behind in the mass of Protoss, more shells exploded, dropping shields, smashing machinery, and crushing Protoss with concussive waves.

Nylador staggered forward, losing balance, and Emily was ready, catching him by the throat as she rose up from beneath him, lifting him, and slamming him on his back onto the sand. Her own Zerg started to boil down from the dune concealing the Siege Tanks, flooding to meet the Protoss and devour them. Pained, but still a capable warrior of 3 centuries, Nylador used the momentum to flip himself, grasping the arm Kestrel was driving him down with and throwing her backward and upside down into the heart of his own warriors. With a twist and swirl of blade wings, she righted herself in mid air, decapitating a Zealot in the process, and slid to a stop with twin furrows of sand.

The rest of the battle was a swirling blur around them and Emily walked forward easily, smile on her face and fire in her eyes. A she had expected, they were ready to fight Zerg, and hadn't had been prepared to deal with the tanks deadly shells. And the shells just loved clustered units. A Zealot sprung at her, blades sweeping. While she had never managed to grow any true telekinetic powers, she could manufacture some precision Psi energy fields around her own body. She blocked the bladed with her left forearm's shielded plate, focusing a Psifeild around her hand, pointed her fingers, and winnowed it through the shields and then the chest of the offender. She retracted her fist and shook the blue blood off, turning to face her target again.

A heavy gauntleted Protoss fist slammed into her gut so hard she heard the cracking of her stomach chitin over the sound of all the air rushing from her body as she was lifted into the air. The hand retracted, and she fell gracelessly to the sand, sputtering and resisting the powerful urge to curl into a fetal ball. She lifted to her hands and knees, probing mentally how badly she was hurt. Her stomach chitin was completely shattered, and she let if fall away rather than leave it to lacerate the exposed, tender flesh if struck again. Her organs were bruised for sure, but nothing felt ruptured. She pushed herself to her feet, and her legs didn't shake. Before she stood fully erect, she flew foreword in a terrific sliding dash, her wings stretched wide, tips slicing through the milling Zerg and Protoss combined before whipping forward like hungry pincers about the smirking Templar. She registered a impressed feeling that a creature without a mouth could smirk that clearly, and then a thrill of surprise as the Templar faded into smoke as her wings tore through it.

A heavy booted foot shot out and caught her in the side of the jaw, spinning her bodily, and fracturing the bone in three places, driving her again to the sand. She was a little more sluggish pushing up this time, and had to dissect a Zealot that leapt at her with her wings before she made it. She spit blood into the sand, and her eyes burned. She had made the Templar mad, but he was still going to wear her down before he held still long enough for her to halt. She snapped her right wrist out, and two barbed darts whistled out and connected to two Zealots repressing a wave of Zerglings. They immediately stopped as her parasites washed their brains with chemicals and they became her puppets, turning with one swift movement to fight at her side, charging the Templar. He sliced them down without hesitance, but she was distracted.

A blue beam of burning energy hit her in the small of the back as the Sentry casting the illusions about her attacked, melting the armor around wings joints where the connected to her back. She held out her armored wrist, absorbing the damage as her armor melted while she pushed toward it, until she was close enough. She slammed her foot down on its head, forcing the beam into the sand before slamming her right hand into its elaborately inscribed plating, and ripping its power core out and crushing it in her fist. The she swiveled, raking with her claws just as the Templar attacked, catching her wrists with each hand. After the damage he had inflicted with his heavy hits, he was slightly stronger than her. He quickly transferred her left wrist into the hold with her right, his long fingers deceptively strong. Then he flicked his freed hand, and the glowing blade of blue Psi energy glowed to life, just in time for him to plunge it into her unarmored side flesh. She scream a high piercing note as her back arched and she thrashed, her wings spasming wildly, trying to break from the deformed armoring and reach the Protoss. As he started to twist the blade, Emily reacted with pure instinct, her head bucking forward with all the force she could muster, cracking into the longer head of the Protoss with a wet crack.

The blow stunned him slightly, and Emily used the lapse to wrench her arms free, and bring her claws down, severing the arm spearing her at the elbow. The blade faded with a hiss and the arm dropped. Emily, still screaming her fury and pain, kicked the shocked creature in the chest, knocking him backward. She slashed out, tearing ribbons of flesh from him in a blind rage until he tripped and went down. She reached back, and physically ripped the hindering plate from her wing base, leapt over the fallen warrior, and stabbed, and stabbed, and stabbed. She didn't stop until all that remained was a blue stain on the churned up white sand. The she planted her feet, spread her wings, and roared her victory so furiously the air around her shook.

Willow, hearing this, gave her orders

"General, pull up stakes and move up, pick off the big ones. The Carriers have started to advance, keep them of our anti-air. Gears whirred and hydraulics whined as the tanks braces retracted and the treads engaged. Sand rooster tailed behind them as they rumbled toward the berm and the firing Hydralisks parted as the tanks descended to the battle torn plain.

The rest of the battle was short lived, as the waves of Zerg continued to pound in from all sides, and Eratha hidden forces emerged to assault the Carriers. 400 Hydralisks burst from the sand as one, firing their first spines before the sand finished falling. One managed to launch two of its interceptors before the wicked spines brought the ship down. The other exploded as its reactor was perforated and detonated. There was a brief mop up, and then the forces moved on the city.

Kestrel rode, standing tall and proud, bleeding from the hole in her side, jaw fractured, insides bruised and burned, on the turret of General Williams tank, her eyes burring with green fire. They entered the city as a crashing wave, her Zerg fanning out between the glimmering structures, Roaches already spraying acid at the closest. But the city was empty.

_Eris, I trust you did your part?_ She sent to the Brood Mother she was grooming become her personal Zerg assistant to coordinate with Willow and direct her Zerg in concert with the human forces under her command, because Kestrel could not relay orders to Willow while she herself was fighting on the front lines.

_Yes, Mistress. As you predicted, the enemy fled to their last bastion, and attempted to flee in their ships. None escaped._

_Any significant resistance, or are they all non-combatants?_ She asked, knowing that the troops she had just slaughtered were the last stand to buy the evacuation time. Her biggest advantage had been that Nylador had thought she was stupid.

_They are no warriors that I have seen. The Mutalisks and Corrupters have not taken fire, and circle the city now. You orders?_ This was the part she hated. Yes, these Protoss had started this, but this group still amounted civilians. But she could not just leave them here, and she knew they would not willingly submit to her after she had just slaughtered most of them. Shit bit her lip.

_Do what you must, Eris. Make it clean._ She could hear the glee in her subordinates mental voice as she accented. She had been miffed she was not involved in the actual battle, fearing she would not get to have any fun. Kestrel did not like the slaughter of innocents, and would avoid it if possible, but she would do what needed to be done, when the situation called for it.

The Zerg swarmed through the dead city, tearing into metal, attacking the robotics that were still moving, and scrapping the rest of the half built drones. Kestrel was tired, and sore, and let the little beasts run free. She did however, see through their eyes, a structure that bore investigation. She stepped down and lowered herself from the tank, and it rolled happily along, launching rounds it some of the heavier structures. She dropped her hand to clutch at her side wound, as it hurt with every step.

^ of her Hunter-Killers burst from the ground and surrounded her, and Willow appeared at her side.

"Ma'am, Wraith's tell me you started bombing the final settlement. They are requesting permission to assist."

"Go ahead. Eris knows not to hurt them." Kestrel replied with a tired sigh. Eris's predecessor had not adhered to this, and had provided an excellent example as to why the humans under Kestrel were not to be accosted. She sent the confirmation over her radio and walked beside Kestrel as she picked her way through the streets of the dead city. She looked to her leader when she was done. "The wing commander assures that the last of the Protoss will be dead within the hour." Emily looked over at her.

"And you know they are all the equivalent of civilians, and that doesn't bother you?" She smiled, shifted her datapad, and took Emily's right hand as they walked."

"When you are with a Brood Matriarch of the Zerg Swarm, you get used to such things." Emily wasn't satisfied with that answer, but she let it go. Thinking on it to heavily while she was this tired and hurt would only bring a feeling of depression, and she wanted to be above that. They continued walking quietly along, a human and hybrid hand in hand, surrounded by their escort of Hydralisks, passing packs of scampering Zerglings, and it was almost peaceful. They rounded a corner and found the structure, random Zerg milling about it, waiting to destroy it when their master was finished sating her curiosity. Kestrel released Willow's hand, and moved slowly up to the glass like pyramid. Contained inside were 4 Protoss, but she could not feel them. It was if the structure was creating a dead spot. She reached out and placed her hand flat on the surface, and suddenly she could sense them.

"What is this?" She said to herself. One of the Protoss inside looked up, dull green eyes glowing faintly.

"A good question. You appear as the Queen of Blades, yet you are not. What treachery is this?"

"It is no tricky, you distrustful animal." Emily replied, her rage building again. But she was to exhausted to flare at the Protoss. "I have killed your Warriors, destroyed your settlements here, and eradicated any chance they had for summoning reinforcements. I need no deception." She growled. The Protoss regarded her with a hooded expression.

"Then what are you?"

"Not to be screwed with." She replied dangerously. The Protoss continued to stare at her calmly. "What is this structure, and why are you encased in it?" She asked, though her force made it clear it was not a request. The Protoss decided it had nothing to lose in answering.

"This is a prison cell. The Tal'darim allowed us within their settlement as we traveled the void, and under the guise of friendship, lured us into their trap." He sounded ashamed, and a little bit angry.

"Why would these Protoss lock up their fellows?" She inquired. The Protoss laughed.

"We are of Shakuras. We have been shunned for centuries for our refusal to submit to the Khala, and the Tal'darim also blame us for the loss of Auir, our ancestral home, to your kind, and second betrayal on our own home by your master."

"Must have been before my time. So then do you oppose the Protoss that were settled here?" The Protoss looked at her, as if examining her spirit. Emily was to worn down to properly shield her mind, and knew that the older Protoss could be rifling through her thoughts at will.

"We do. The Tal'darim follow a path we cannot abide. They claim to serve the Xel'naga, but their minds are corrupted, fractured. They are dangerous, devoted fanatically to their false gods."

"Wonderful. Now I have to watch out not only for Protoss, but _crazy_ Protoss." She sighed and let her head droop, the brought her eyes again to meet the Protoss's. "All the Tal'darim here, on my planet, will be dead shortly. With that, you would have no reason to remain, correct." The Templar matched her stare.

"No, our business would be concluded."

"But if I were to let you leave, you would report my presence to others of your ilk, correct?" He did not hesitate, and his voice remained level. She may not be particularly fond of the Protoss at the moment, but they could embrace the inevitable with fortitude.

"Yes, we would. The Zerg is a threat that cannot be ignored, even at our present strength."

"Then I would have to leave you locked in there, or kill you. And I am not so cruel as to let captives wither to death in a cell. Would you accept your deaths without struggle?" She thought she felt a smile brush her mind.

"No, my friend, we would give an accounting of ourselves that would make our ancestors proud." Now he hesitated, as if grappling with something that was almost too difficult for him to bear. "But, I can see into your battle weary mind. A third, somewhat distasteful option." She was mildly irked, but there was little she could do to shield herself.

"But for the same reasons you do not trust me, I cannot trust you."

"That is true, normally." He said in such a way she knew that he was going to issue an exception. "You serve the Queen of Blades, but you are no puppet of her will, are you? You retain the majority of the sovereignty of your mind, yes?"

"As much as she permits." Kestrel said distantly.

"Then, take me and my brethren into your service. The void whispers of a coming darkness, one that we alone cannot stand against. Perhaps an alliance between our races is not possible, and never can be. But we can no longer afford to be bound by the stringent codes in the manner that we have in the past." He finally broke contact, glancing away from her, whispering almost to himself. "Extinction make no exceptions for honor." He turned his blazing eyes back to hers. He could feel her skepticism. "On my Honor, my hand will not be raised to harm you, other than in defense." The three other Protoss echoed the oath. Kestrel bit her lip, as she considered this. From the looks of it, these Protoss had been attacked in much the same way she had been. If it hadn't been for the asshole Protoss, she never would have seen them. Why should she kill them? He conscience, still bitter over the destruction of the civilians, seemed to be pushing her to spare them.

She summoned more Zerg to her, and within a minute, she had 12 of her Hunter-Killers, 20 regular Hydralisks, and a carpet of Zerglings surrounding the pyramid.

"If I am to do this... You will remain under heavy guard, obey me, my Brood mothers, and my human without hesitation, and any untoward actions will be cause for retaliation. Is that acceptable?" He gave the impression of a bow.

"Your will be done, my Matriarch." He intoned, and the other three gave their wordless consent. Emily balled her fist, and slammed the smooth surface hard. A spider web of cracks skittered around the impact. She brought her right wing tip forward, and drove it through the material, then worked the blade up and down with her hand, creating a opening. She then balled her fist again, summoned the sheaf of Psionic energy, and slammed the breach with all her power.

The Pyramid exploded in a shower of dust, and Kestrel was pushed back behind a wall of Zerg flesh, screening her in case of treachery. The Protoss all stood, slowly, with arms raised in the gesture of peace. Their leader took a tentative step forward. She caught a air of... satisfaction from him, so brief it she might have imagined it. He was behaving as this outcome was a desired result, something planned for, but he might have just been confident.

My name is Quirxen, Matriarch. What is your command?"

"I am Kestrel, Templar. Go, sweep through the wreckage of this settlement. I will halt the destruction long enough for you to flag supplies. After that., I will have a Leviathan come to extract you to the Primary Hive cluster, and assign you quarters. Once you are settled, you will report to Willow, the human, and she will give you your orders. Go." The Templar gave a gracious nod, turned, and sprinted in tandem with its kin.

"And interesting choice." Willow commented as the quartet vanished. Kestrel grunted. She turned and walked toward the settlements entrance, so her personal Leviathan could pick her up. She was going to cocoon to heal tonight, and wither her newest uninfested subjects now in her care, she preferred the extra safety of the airborne Zerg just as an added precaution. She was thankful she was no longer human in body, as that damned Protoss's blade had really done more damage than she'd wanted to admit. Bu she was Zerg now. She would survive, she would grow, and she would continue to evolve. She knew her alliances were unorthodox, but the more she fought and conquered with them, the more she felt validated. She sighed heavily, and Willow slipped her hand back into hers. Kestrel gave it a light squeeze, smiled weakly, and turned her mind to the work to be done.

**End 5.**

**Alright. This ends my Pre Heart of the Swarm content. We will pick up again at the very last minutes of Wings of Liberty, and go a little bit into what happened when the Queen of Blades is no longer in command. Then, I will be doing a Emily/Kerrigan thing, showing how both are going about their business. So, for those of you still with me, thanks for reading, and i hope you like it.**


	6. The Queen is Dead

**Starcraft: Contingency**

**Disclaimer: I do Not own Starcraft.**

_**Warning: Spoilers for Heart of the Swarm contained herein.**_

**Chapter 6: The Queen is dead**

_-After the moment of Kerrigan being hit by the Xel'naga device-_

_-1 year after last chapter -_

Emily came slowly to her senses, bits and pieces of information assaulting her from all sides. Her head throbbed, burning with a fever, her stomach rolled, her blood screamed for murder. Her eyes fluttered and her body spammed, her back arching and limbs twitching. She couldn't think, her memory was blanked. Kill, grow, destroy, rip, rend, feast, slaughter. The feelings played over and over in her head. She screamed, a violent, painful, disgusting noise of death and suffering and insanity. With a final tremor, she was flung up, landing in her stomach. Her eyes snapped open.

In the semi darkness of the throbbing enclosure, her eyes glowed a dull, murky green, like ooze stirred from the bottom of a fetid pond. Her pupils were slits that were reptilian in their bestial intensity. Her arms and legs tried to push herself up, but jittered away and left her lying. The she caught it. She could smell a creature. It was close. A sweetish musk of rest, and sex, and fear. Her head rolled and she saw it, against the pulsing red ribbed wall. A Creature with floppy white skin. She hissed, and foam drooled from her mouth, her eyes burning with the urge to taste blood. She slashed with her wings, but they refused to co-operate. She continued to slash, again and again and again, but the creature just whimpered and cowered. Suddenly a pain exploded in her stomach, and she curled into a ball. She rolled back to her stomach, managed to push herself up, and tried to scream in rage and agony.

Instead she vomited. Great gouts of blood and other foul fluid poured from her mouth and onto the creep. She gasped, and the stream halted, then hit again with greater force. There was a wet splat from within the mess of gore and sick streaming from her mouth. Finally, the last of the evil smelling ick finished flowing outward, and she fell to her side in a fetal ball, and sobbed.

She did not know how long she lay sobbing, but when her fever cleared and she had her first coherent thought, he vomit had all been cleared by the creep.

"Kestrel?" A scared hesitant voice called from the side of the hive. She managed to crane her head to look at the speaker. It a human, cowering against the wall, wearing only a sheet. Kestrel's eyes stilled glowed a dull, murky light, but the pupils were no longer slitted. It took her ravaged brain a few seconds before she recognized the creature as a human. She gave a grunt that was just above a whimper.

"Are you... okay?" She tried to answer, and coughed. She managed to find the strength to push herself up on her arms.

"I'll *cough* live. I think." She coughed again, and pushed herself into a sitting position. She looked around. She finally came to her full senses, her head still throbbed, her stomach had settled, and she felt a sense of indescribable loneliness. The inside had been torn to shreds, blood dribbling from scratches and tears, gouges had been ripped out of the floor, and everything was intensely messy. The human against the wall she finally made out as Willow.

"Wha... what happened? Are you ok?" She nodded, still clearly scared, even though Emily could not feel anything Psionically from her.

"I was woken by you screaming. Suddenly you just started, and it was horrifying. Then you started thrashing around. I got up and moved away, and you started slashing and tearing at the walls and floor like you were having some kind of seizure. Then finally you screamed some more until you vomited." Emily shook her head. Her whole body ached like it had been stretched and let to snap back to shape. Her attention was snagged by an object that was sitting in the receding pool of blood she had purged. What had first caught her attention was that the blood was the deep, dark red of organ blood. She picked it up. It almost looked like a small, yellow egg. She picked it up, and examined it, but could not glean anything from it. She tried to summon Abelard, but she could not link to him. Panicked, she tried her other links. All were dead. She turned her head as something touched her shoulder. She looked up. Willow had folded the sheet around herself and placed a hand on her shoulder. She took her hand and let the smaller woman help her to her feet.

"Come on," she said with a weary sigh. He entire body ached with each movement. "We are going to go see what is happening with the rest of my swarm." She placed an arm around Willow's shoulders as the walked toward Abelard's pit. She wanted him to examine the thing she'd coughed up.

"Why? What's happened?" She asked. Kestrel bit her lip, then decided that she could share it with Willow.

"I think I was having an reaction to a certain severing of one of my mental links." She didn't want to say it, for fear it would legitimize the fact of the matter. She had tested this link more times than she could count since she lost her crazy. But she could feel it, like a cold darkness burning in her mind. "The Queen of Blades is dead."

(...)

_- One week later, aboard the ship Hyperion -_

Sarah Kerrigan splashed water into her face again from the shallow metal basin in her "room" which was essentially a holding cell. Not that she could blame them for this. She had little memory of her time as the Zerg, but she could almost sense the horror of it, and the thoughts of the others in the ship about her did not help. Her "hair" or nerve cords, rattled like dried gourds as she shook her head. The sound was going to drive her crazy in short order. She splashed more water in her face.

She had been... human, she guessed, for just under a week now. All she really remember clearly was looking up and seeing Jim standing over her, face contorted by worry. She had flashes of things, but it was all dark and hazy. She had been so sick when he had ... saved her, she guessed, that she had been hooked up to life support for most of the time, lying unconscious and broken on a medical bed. She had had brief times of being awake, and every time he had been there at her side, to take her weak hand and tell her she would be okay. She could still feel the Zerg in her, pulsing and urging her slightly, but it was a distant, weak sensation, like smoke. It called to her, a forbidden temptation, a phantom longing that she wanted to embrace... but wouldn't.

She had Jim with her, and she realized that was what she really wanted. All the other feelings churning inside her seemed to quiet when he was near, and she wasn't afraid.

She toweled her face and looked into the small mirror attached to the bulkhead above the basin. Small bits of chitin and other things were visible around the visible roots oh her "hair" and resisted her attempts to remove them as hard as the "hair" itself had resisted cutting. Her eyes were also a dirty yellow color that she didn't like.

"Hello, Sarah." A deep, menacing voice said behind her. She swiveled, but there was no one there, just the flat bed. She rubbed her eyes and looked back in the mirror, and someone was on the bed. She turned again, and this time it was sitting on the bed. It looked like a woman, but it was different, with hard edges, spines, and large, delicate looking wings. She knew she was looking at the Queen of Blades, but had no idea how. After all, she was the Queen of Blades... sort of.

"I am glad you recognize me, Sarah. We never got the chance to meet." She stood and took a step forward. "It's funny, seeing we never met, but I know you so very well." The Queen smiled a predatory smile, walking forward. Sarah held her ground, fearing she had lost her mind.

"No, your mind is whole, Sarah." The Queen of Blades paused within 3 feet of her, an stood, looking over Sarah. "I see our figure did not really change in the restructuring." There was a deep, dark seduction in the Queen's voice.

"What are you?" She whispered. The figures yellow eyes glowed balefully in the pale light.

"I am what is left of the Overmind's contamination in you." She answered easily. "Whatever it is that that human did to us, it ripped the taint from us, while leaving you still able to claim to be Zerg." She then smiled softly, reading Sarah's thoughts. "No, that was a bad way of putting it. You were there through all of it. But we were together, Sarah, and it was glorious." The Queen's eyes flashed.

"There is no cheap cop out. You, and I, were responsible for all that we did. But it was only because we were together that we achieved so very much."

"I... I don't know what you are talking about. I can't remember anything from... from then." The Queen put her hand on Sarah's shoulder, and she was surprised by the weight of it.

"Oh, but you will. Right now, no, you cannot. Whatever that device was, it scrambled our brain pretty good. Like a tornado scooping up and scouring the land clean, we have to wait for the particles to settle again before we will be whole again."

"I don't want to be whole again!' She almost spat, and the Queen merely smiled her knowing smile.

"You cannot lie to me, Sarah." She whispered softly. "Because I am you. We are a part of the Swarm, now. It's in our DNA, our very blood burns with its spore. And we can rule it all again, Sarah. We can take over the Galaxy, if that is what we want. Now we are truly free to direct the Swarm as we please. The Overmind's influence is gone, it cannot sway you any longer, bending your passions to the grand design that was created for us. All you have to do is take back what is ours."

And Kerrigan thought about it. Her memories were confused, jumbled. But certain things shown through the mental murk. The warmth of her Hive, the unerring obedience of her Zerg, the hot blood on her claws. She shivered with a longing to return, before another memory crashed in and shattered her will.

Jim was looking down on her frail body, and tears burned her eyes. The first tears she had felt in 4 long, weary years. She had been so consumed with directionless hate, just the fatigue of finally having it washed clean from her soul almost killed her. But as Jim picked her out of the mist of disintegrated Zerg, and he burned with a fierce happiness that shown like the sun. The was a scuffle and a pair of gun shots, and a grim sadness grappled with the joy, but she lost consciousness still in the glow of the joy.

"I don't care." She said with an iron clad thrum of will. The Queen snorted and crossed her arms.

"Really, Sarah? You would give up all the power of the Swarm for this ... Human?" She said the word like it tasted bad. Sarah looked sown and away, answering quietly, but no less resolute.

"I would give up anything for him." And she realized as she said t it was true.

"Why? What can this human possibly ..."

"His name is Jim." Kerrigan said with a sharp force as she looked back up meet the eyes of the disrespectful Zerg apparition, her eyes giving a brief yellow flash. The Queen smiled took a step backward.

"What can this _Jim_ offer that the Swarm cannot match or give better." She said in a slightly more respectful tone.

"I... I don't know. But I do know I love him, and I won't give him up again, now that I have a chance to stay with him." The Queen gave a bitter chuckle.

"And you really expect him to want you, once his emotional fervor calms?" He voice built, getting stronger. She was hit with a memory.

"After your tortured mind called out to him, and drew him to Char so he could witness your birth as the Queen of Blades?" She caught glimpses of her own birth, more than 5 years prior, and the scarred, hurt emanations her mind had sent out while she was rebuilt, drawing Jim and Mengsk's troops to Char. "We felt his heart break that day, as you emerged and let him go, to suffer with the knowledge that his love was gone, and he was resposible." The stab of guilt dug into her resolve.

"How many of his friends did me slaughter when we used him and the foolish Dark Templar to end the Overmind and Cerebrates? I know you remember his vow as her fled while hundreds of others died when we turned on them after the New Overmind was destroyed. He swore he would personally see you dead for it. And I know you can still feel it in him when he is with you now, bubbling just under the surface thoughts." She was slapped with the memory of Raynor's rage stricken voice, and she grabbed her ears as if trying to ward of the thoughts like they were sound.

How long will he be able to suppress the guilt he feels for letting you live after the horrors we have authored?"

"Stop it!" She cried, falling to her knees. The Queen to a step forward.

"How much longer can you honestly think he will continue sacrificing for you, when he can't even tell himself if you are the woman he loved."

"Stop. It!" She said, through clenched teeth. Fighting back the tears as her apparition voiced her own doubts with a vocal ferocity that matched the intensity of the emotion.

"Hell, are you even still the woman he loved?!" The Queen shouted, sweeping her arm.

"YES!" Sarah roared, a pulse of Psionic energy shimmering outward and buffeting the Queen back a step as Kerrigan came to her feet, fist clenched and held out. "Yes, damn it, I am!" The Queen gained her balance.

"You are what?" She roared back.

"I am Sarah Kerrigan." Her voice had fallen in volume, but contained a deadly certainty, and her eyes glowed yellow and alive. The Queen smiled.

"Yes, you are." She smiled. "And I am proud to be you." She moved forward to the braced woman, and stroked her cheek. "Remember that. I know not what lies ahead for us, Sarah, but it will not be good. I can feel the memory, like a skeleton buried by silt, of something that is coming. And we will need to be sure of ourselves if we are to stand against its coming darkness." The Queen cupped Sarah's cheek as the rush of adrenaline and anger washed from her system and she was suddenly tired. She continued almost softly.

"You know you cannot count on him to still love us after all we have done, even though we know her will try. But rest easily, know that, even though you hate yourself more that all but the bastard traitor Mengsk, that I love you, and I will always love you, Sarah." The Queens eyes glowed and bored into her own, and the edges of her form began to blur and distort. "We will face the tasks ahead together, my love. You, me, and our Swarm, and I we will prevail, or die trying, but we will never be used again, by anyone." The Queen's body continued to break like smoke disturbed, until her eyes were all that were left. They blinked, and were gone. She turned back to the Mirror, and looked at herself, shaking slightly. Her eyes burned down inside like her vision of the Queen of Blades had done. She smiled slightly, knowing her fire had been relit, and she was ready to fight, but for what she cared about now. And the first hurdle, as soon as she was strong enough, would be that bastard Arcturus. She would not deny the blood on her hands, but she was damn sure going to make him pay for it."

(...)

"Jesus, did you see that?" The technician stationed at the monitoring station that tracked Sarah Kerrigan's mental and telemetry data asked his partner.

"Yeah, but what was it?" They had been watching the increased mental activity since she had woken up. It was odd, the squiggling lines had been dancing in an odd but stable pattern for about half an hour, when suddenly a spike located in the part of her brain that did not exist in normal humans had shown a sharp spike of activity. They had special sensors installed, to deal with her Zerg heritage, as well as the sheer power of her Psionic signature. She outclassed all the records the ship held, and even asleep registered with a fully active PI of 8. The spike pushed well past 10, and from a region that had been dead until the pike. After it activated, it seemed to infect the rest of her brainwaves, sending the whole system into wild oscillations. Suddenly the whole system exploded, her measurements pushing off the charts in all directions, and destroying the sensor equipment mounted in her room. One remained when the screens cleared and began printing the data again.

"Look at this, the system had stabilized." He pointed at the new graph of multicolored lines. All the waves, including those by the new area of the brain were flowing in smooth, zigzagging lines, pushing just past the marker for a PI of 11, one point stronger that the highest ever recorded.

"What do you think happened?" His assistant asked, reading the data that was pouring in.

"Hell if I know. But I am glad I am out here, away from _her._" He said darkly.

**End 6.**

**Okay, I really wanted to get to the Kerrigan part, and I want to get this posted, so I am breaking it off here, as an intro to both sides I am going to be jumping between as milestone occur between here, and the point right before the assault of Korhal. Plus, I finally figured out what purpose the Disciples were supposed to serve (at least as far as Emily is concerned) other than the fact that I wanted to explore the Zerg more. From here on, we'll have some personal time with all the fun guys, Matt, Valerian, Stukov, Dehaka, Abathur, and maybe even Zagara. Plus, might do a whole break off chapter on expanding Kerrigan's integration with Duran/Narud, classic Bond villain styled banter.**

**Anyway, thanks for reading, and good night.**


	7. Long Live the King

**Starcraft: Contingency**

**Disclaimer: I do Not own Starcraft.**

_**Warning: Spoilers for Heart of the Swarm contained herein.**_

**Chapter 7: Long Live the King**

_-One week after the fall of the Queen of Blades-_

Kestrel stood near the open mouth of her Leviathan as it flew toward her direction, inside the atmosphere of Char. She had recovered her connection with her Brood within the first day after the Queen had died, and her Brood had barley registered that anything had happened. She guessed it was the distancing that Kerrigan had tried to pattern on them was successful. She had delivered the thing she had thrown up to Abelard, who had examined it intently, but could not discover what it was, or why she had had it inside her. The materials were Zerg, but he could not identify the stains or the purpose of the organ.

Naturally, with the Queen cut out, Kestrel had tried other paths to find out what was happening, but all her lines to Char were not working. They were all giving her the mental equivalent of static. It took 2 days of trying before she had managed to punch through the static and contact the Cerebrate. His voice was scared, hurt, and weak, and she felt pity for the creature, rather than the disgust she felt she should, as a Zerg, feel. But she had liked the way the Cerebrate had treated her when she was still on Char. He had explained what had happened the best he could. A Dominion task force had dropped to the surface of the planet, destroyed the orbital platform hosting the majority of the Queen's personal air force, and then launched an assault on her direct Hive cluster. There was some kind of detonation, and then everything in its radius was dead, including the Queen of Blades. This was particularly troubling for the Cerebrate, as it needed to be bound to a higher class of Zerg over form to survive over long. With the Queen dead, Kestrel was the only one he could turn to, and she agreed. She loaded up part of her Brood that she could access close at hand, while ordering Eris and Cholus to load up their Broods and follow her when they could. It had taken two days to make the jump to Char, and the situation was much worse than se had thought it was.

Feral Zerg rolled about the landscape, tearing into each other in a mad orgy of directionless violence. The portions of the visible ground that weren't covered in creep were literally drenched in the blood of the dead and wounded. Again she felt sorry for the poor creatures. She hadn't been nearly as closely tied to the Queen as they had, and the stress of the severance had nearly broken her mind. She could only imagine the stress to these less mentally developed, and more dependant creatures. Quirxen appeared at her shoulder his eyes glowing faintly in the dim light inside of the great beast. True to his word, he and his other Templar had severed her with unquestioning loyalty, and had become valuable allies and comrades to her in the past year. The dark Templar had managed to even help her with some Protoss settlements, their natural ability to cloak ability allowing them to slip in undetected and sort out who could be trusted, and who needed to be cleansed. Outside of Willow, the even tempered Protoss was about the only one she considered a friend.

"I can still recall," the Templar said pensively, "when a sight like this would have brought me unbridled joy. The Swarm leaderless, hopefully due to our hand. The Queen of Blades dead, and the remaining Zerg fighting among themselves until they expired." He swept his eyes across the tortured landscape, and the millions of dead and dying. "And while I will not lie and say I do not derive any pleasure from this suffering, I do regret the Queens passing."

"Why?" Kestrel responded flatly. "From what you have told me, this should be one of the best moments of Protoss history." He cocked his head in the way that conveyed amusement.

"True, Matriarch. But the universe had much in store for your Queen." He had stated that before, but staunchly refused to elaborate on it. She knew he knew something... but as long as he was loyal, she was not bothered.

"For what good that did us." She sighed heavily. "Is everyone on your crew ready to go? They know that the Cerebrate and his Zerg are friendlies?" He nodded.

"Yes. We have our robotics set, and the living among our number are only those whom we can most trust." She could feel that he had no doubt in this, and she trusted his confidence. While the Protoss's injuries at the hands of the Swarm were too numerous for a real alliance to form, a few outspoken and radically minded of the firstborn race were willing to ally themselves under the grizzled warrior. A handful of Phoenix fighters were docked in the lower areas of the leviathan, and would be assisting the Cerebrates meager air forces while Emily covered him while he bonded to her, and loaded much of his remaining brood into her leviathan. Most of his brood survived, as he was located a long way away from where the Queens primary hive was, and what was now the Dominions headquarters on the planet. They were fanning out, wiping away the remaining Zerg as they went, but it would still be weeks before they would reach where the Cerebrate was.

But the Dominion wasn't the only one fighting for the planet. Many of the Brood Mothers that had retained their sanity were waging war against one another for control of the Zerg. Add this to the feral Zerg fighting anything that moved, and were literally everywhere, just getting to the Cerebrate would have been a problem. But luckily, the attack on Char had knocked out so much of the total air coverage in the area, that the leviathan could punch through with little difficulty. Kestrel looked down at the swirling chaos below, and noticed a clear line of Zerg moving toward where the Cerebrate sat. At the lead of the column, which they were roughly over, were two Ultralisk. The mainstay of the forces seemed to be Zerglings, though she could see pockets fo roaches among the swarming carpet of Zerg. She was going to stall the column, then bind the Cerebrate to her will, extract his troops, and leave this broken planet. She could feel the different Brood Mothers in the area, but she was unfamiliar with them, and they refused to bow to her will. So she would have to show them.

"Ready your troops, Quirxen. We shall sweep aside these lesser Zerg, and I will be relying on you to hold them at bay as I bond." He bowed without moving.

"Your will be done, Matriarch. We shall enjoy this exercise. We have not slaughtered Zerg if far too long." Kestrel snorted back a laugh.

"Well, now you will have your chance." She turned from the templar, and moved to the edge of the great creatures mouth. She turned her back to the opening, tilted, and fell.

Smoke whipped around her as she plummeted toward the ground. She tweaked her wings, the membrane spreading between the spokes, and she righted herself, oriented face down, and angled her wings to achieve terminal velocity. Wind whistled round her as she knifed through the air, and with only a slight change in her body's shape, she sliced clean through the back of the left Ultralisk, a concussive boom following a second behind slammed into the massive beast and brought it slamming face first into the ground, already dead. The force of Emily's velocity as she tore through it had liquefied that area she had contacted. She hit the creep hunched low, sliding in the goo for more than 200 meters in the lead of the column. She beat her wings once, spinning herself to face the now confused and angry Zerg while still riding the slide. She spread her wings straight out, halting all her movement and bringing her to a calm stand. Her Membrane retracted, but she kept her wings spread for effect.

"I am Kestrel." She said in a low, threatening voice that she also projected throughout the assembled horde. "And this valley is mine. Turn back, and you will be spared." She left her arms hanging at her sides, but her hands had curled into claws. The remaining Ultralisk roared and charged, the ground seeming to quake under its charge. As it closed within a reasonable distance, it reared back to the left, its Kaiser blades arcing to swat and tear her to bits. Kestrel took a deep, steadying breath, and leapt into the air, contorting herself into the space between the giant tusks. She landed lightly on the surface of the lower blade, pulling in her wings to clip into her back. As the blade closed with the beasts chest, she jumped and clung to its chest armor/ With a quick thrust of her shoulder muscles she launched herself up its front, buried her left wingtip with a quick snap into its throat. She swung her body around to the back of its head, letting her right wing strike out around and embed itself next to the left tip. She braced her feet, grabbed her wings, and pushed.

Slowly, her wings cut through the armor and muscle, until finally, with a wet squelching noise and geyser of gore, the head and neck slid off and the body sagged and went down. She rode it smoothly down, using her wings to balance. When the corpse settled, she flapped her wings to clean a bit of the heavy blood and sinew from them.

"I gave you a chance." She said, and turned to walk off the dead Ultralisk toward the Cerebrate. Drop pods began to rain from the sky, impacting around and even in the carpet of Zerg, and Kestrel's brood began to ravage the offending Zerg.

(...)

_-Two weeks after the fall of The Queen of Blades-_

The process of bonding with the Cerebrate was ... interesting. It was similar to the link she had had with the Queen, but she was the dominant in this link. It was similar too, to her link with her Brood, but the strength of the intelligence was so different than even her Brood Mothers, it was weird. It was as if a warmth had flowed into her mind into a crevice she was not aware of. He was relieved, to say the least, about having a stable bond again, and once he was joined, was happy about relocating to Bliss. He could still remember what it was like before Kerrigan had unified the swarm after the death of the Overmind, and he wanted to be well away from the Chaos. Kestrel stood in front of the huge, pulsing work-like creature, her hand pressed to its side.

"It is slightly odd, Cerebrate, standing in your physical presence." He gave a dry chuckle.

"I am sure it must be, my friend. I am most grateful for your assistance. No other Zerg would have ever come to my aid."

"True. Let us hope that leaving we with such silly sentimentality was a wise choice." She said softly.

"From my vantage point, it seems so. What are your orders, Matriarch?"

"We need to get you on the Leviathan. Can you move?"

'Not in this form. But I would need to conduct my Broods into their position before I shed this skin."

"Very well. My Brood had arrived in the majority. We will begin taking your defenses so you may load. I do not foresee and serious problems..." She paused as a sound assaulted her mind. It tapered down into a hissing voice brimming with rage, hate and satisfaction.

"Kestrel! I know you are here, little cricket." Emily's blood froze. She would recognize that horrible voice anywhere. "I can feel you, even if I cannot see you. Come and face me, you little bitch." She turned, and while he could not feel her exact position, he knew where she would be. Her, on the other hand, could feel him as a dark, pulsing beacon of hate.

"Why?" She projected. "I have no quarrel with you, Basilisk." He gave a slithering laugh.

"Wrong. The Queen is dead. I know you know it to, or else you would not have come to loot her Broods, as I have." She tried to project a negative response, but he pressed onward. "But there is only room for one of us here." She heard him growl, a deep, excited noise. "The Queen is dead. Long live the King." She would have no choice but to go and meet his challenge, lest he come to her/ She could feel the blanket of his Zerg, and knew if it came down to a numbers fight, she would lose. Her wings bristled at the thought, but she knew she needed the time.

_"Load as much as your brood as you can. I will stall Basilisk for as long as I can. Once you get the majority, I want you to shed and load yourself. I do like my odds on this fight, and wish to have a prompt escape if necessary."_

_"As you command, Matriarch."_ She reached deeper in her mind, and connected to Eris, her chief Brood Mother.

_"Eris."_

_"Yes, Matriarch?"_

_"I have encountered a hitch on the planets surface. One of the other Disciples is here, Basilisk, and he is impeding my work to extricate the Cerebrate. It is necessary that I confront him. You have proven a loyal, and trustworthy commander. I have strengthened our link, so if I should fall, control of my Swarm will revert to you."_

_"Thank you, Matriarch." _Kestrel thought she detected a hint of real gratitude in the Brood Mothers mental voice. She had chosen the genes and traits most carefully when sculpting this Zerg, and it seemed to have paid off. _I wish you luck. Slaughter the usurper!" _Kestrel smiled in spite of herself.

"Very well, Basilisk. If it will sooth your childish ego to draw me out, I will comply." The noise he made was somewhere between a bitter laugh and a snarl.

"Come to me then, bitch, and I shall show you what it takes to lead the swarm."

(...)

_-Meanwhile, in an Umojan Science facility-_

Kerrigan was tired. Tired of the test. Tired of the Scientists. And tired of being looked at like she was a monster. Granted, she pretty much was, but still she was getting depressed by the constant creeped out treatment she was getting.

"It is to be expected, Sarah. All of these people, they know who you are." She sighed hevily, as the Queen of Blades, leaning against the wall in front of her, spoke calmly.

"I know, and I deserve it. But that doesn't mean I have to like it."

"Makes you miss home, doesn't it. Not questions, no probing. Just the quiet respect and obedience of fawning children. Sarah gave a huffing chuckle.

"When you put it like that, is does sound nice." He face clouded. "But that part of my life is over now." She glanced sharply at the other woman. "And making me pine for it isn't going to anything but make us feel worse." The Queen chuckled sadly.

"See? I told you your memories would begin to return, Sarah." She scouled up at her.

"Yes, and I am getting peices. But you're still here. Why?" Now the Queen sighed.

"I have told you, Sarah, again and again. We are one. I told you. I am what is left of the corruption that controlled the motivation you had while fully the Queen of Blades. I am your mind, existing free of the dirty canalization you had as a human." This was something new, and Sarah looked up, curiosity flaring.

"Wait. What do you mean with that." The Queen shifted, pushed of the wall, an walked over, sitting down next to her more human half. She took one of Sarah's soft hands with her own armored hand, and smiled at her.

"I am recovering memories as our mind readjusts from the trauma as well. I have an idea as to what we were back then, bases on my own colored memories. It was as if, I was you, but lacking all the little flavors that made you human. But I still possessed all the traits, and could use them as a chose, without being bothered by the petty feelings attached to them." She looked off in the distance, thinking. "It's like... I was you, all of you, but I could choose what parts to let have sway at any given time." Sarah caught the feel of what she was talking about, which, if she hadn't already been used to it, she would have found that catching her own memories coming from a fragmented part of her own consciousness odd. She relived some of the memories, sitting quietly, still holding her apparitions hand. When the memories faded, it was like had just lived again, and had an exact understanding of what she meant.

It was all of her, her intelligence, her shrewdness, her cunning, her drive. All of it. She was the monster, and she had liked it.

(...)

"Look! There's a spike in her levels." The technicians who had been monitoring her data for the last week had noted no irregular patterns until now. But the spike in activity was in an area of her brain that was not present in the human brain, and had been dormant since her waves patterns had stabilized.

"Is that... a bad thing?" The junior of the pair asked.

"I don't really know. But look at it if we overlay it with the carrier waves found in the Overlords that we have examined." The Lead tech typed a flurry of commands, and a second bundle of diagrams appeared on the screen. He manipulated the data until he had a similar, and larger spike that matched the one they were seeing in the subject. He eyed it curiously, then typed in and brought up a third. He clucked interestedly.

"Hmm. From the data we have been able to get, this..." he tapped the spike in the wave pattern. A single wavy line untangled itself from the mess and displayed more prominently. "wave here is the "sent" signal from a stronger Zerg intelligence. Now, on the Overlord, the cerebral cluster is the receptor for these signals. Now, assuming this is the same in the subject, this would mean she is receiving a signal. But based on the shape, and the strength of signal, this signal is not only emanating from her, but is her. Her signal is a match, in its current form, to the Queen of Blades we have on record." The junior tech looked pensive for a moment before speaking.

"So, then what the data is saying is, that the subject still is possessing of her Zerg communication functions in the brain... and she is receiving information... from herself? What does that mean?"

"It means," the lead tech said softly, "that Prince Valerian needs to see this."

(...)

Valerian Mengsk was weary. So much had been gambled on this grand, sweeping move. So many pieces had been juggled in the air, and he could almost feel the course fibers of the noose tightening around his neck. In retrospect, tweaking his father's nose at the fact the he was going to be neutralizing his greatest foe was a bad move. He knew that the elder Mengsk would be sending his own troops to eliminate Kerrigan, but he liked think he would have her... He didn't know. He had been allowing Raynor to take the lead on this operation. And Raynor was the topmost expert in Kerrigan, as well, and had proven to be far more of a man than his father had led on. But he understood why Raynor had to have been branded and pursued with such intensity. The only real surprise there was that Arcturus had ever let him flee at all, and not just had him executed as soon as Tarsonis feel.

Valerian had studied much about what would be required to rule once he succeeded the throne, and, as he saw it now, wisely avoided taking many of his father's practices to heart. While the endeavor to eliminate Raynor made sense, it was personal for his father. His wanted Raynor gone because he felt he had been personally betrayed by the man, after all he had done to throw off the yoke of the Confederacy. But Valerian would not make that mistake. The Emperor is the will of the people, and can afford no personal vendettas. He sighed, and brushed his nerves away. It was always unsettling, talking to her. She was just on a level so different from anyone else, it felt odd.

"Crank up the shield." The slanted shutter in front of the Prince moved silently upward, looking down into the cell with the bed where she was sequestered.

"I am getting impatient, Valerian." She said softly, and the noise carried softly into the observation room through speakers. She echoed her speech in his head, and he had a feeling that it was just because she knew it bugged him.

"And a good morning to you as well, Kerrigan." She stared up at him, her yellow eyes glowing softly in their purple rimmed hollows. She continued to stare silently, motionless, like a cat. "I fully understand your desire to regain some of your autonomy. But you must understand the great risk we took in retrieving you, and the possible risk that you still represent." Her gaze didn't shift.

"Where is Jim?" She demanded, low and dangerous. He sighed, thinking to himself that her behaving as a petulant child was not going to speed her time here.

"He was unavailable to visit. Despite his desire to see you, he is still in charge of a band of revolutionaries."

"One that will put you out of a job." She growled.

"We shall see. But that is not what I came to talk about today. The lab staff seems to beleive you are being contacted through your Zerg brain fuctions. I am curious as to what you have been receiving." She closed her eyes. She knew antagonizing the Prince would not benefit her. She took a deep breath.

"I haven't been receiving anything, Valerian. Not in the sense that I am connected with any of my... the Zerg. Iguess... it might be me regaining some memories. I still have no idea what went on while I was with the Zerg, but I can remember some stuff I couldn't before today."

"Well, it is nice to see you are recovering. What are your plans once you are released into James' custody?" She opened her eyes and fully looked at him now.

"Simple. I am going to kill your father."

"And the Dominion?"

"Is a tool for him to satisfy his ego. Any who get in my way will be annihilated. Those who don't are not my concern."

"I wonder, Kerrigan. You are still possessing a number of physiological changes that were an effect of your infestation. We would like to see if these organs would allow you some control over the Zerg, even in back in your human form." She glared at him, her derision plain to see, even to a non-telepath.

"I wasn't infested." Her voice held a shadow of the Queen's bestial fury in its low growl. "Infestation wipes the mind and creates a shambling war form. I was specially bred to be the Overmind's greatest creation, specifically to retain my mind and abilities."

"And did it work? Did you retain your mind?" She continued to glare at the young Mengsk, the shadow of her rage pushing under her consciousness, wanting to take control. She took a deep, steadying breath, fighting it.

"Like I have said, Valerian. I have no memories of my time as the Queen of Blades. All I really remember is being taken, then coming to in the Hyperion, and even that is still a little hazy. I would not even know how to go about controlling the Zerg again, outside of how I was used way back before the Sons of Korhal were a large movement." Valerian looked down at her, tapping his chin.

"Would you willing to try? I assure you that your cooperation in this matter would serve to expedite the time before we can release you into James Raynor's custody." She averted her eyes slightly, this effecting her.

"I can try." She said in a sigh, before bringing her eyes and full weight back to her voice. "But I warn you, Valerian. No one who is not Zerg will ever be able to control them. The Zerg may seem like mindless beasts, but they are a solid sentient species, Valerian, and they will fight until they are free. It's in their very beings. Don't make the mistake of trying to bend them to your will that your father made." She felt a slight twinge of anger and resentment in him at this, and felt that was a good sign.

"Thank you, Kerrigan. We will have some test set up, and I will let you know when we are ready for you." He gave the impression of a bow, though he did not move, and the partition again slide down to seal the observation window. Her barb about his father had struck deep, and an old saying played about in his head. There was a fine line between being confident, and being arrogant. And with the stakes involved being so dangerous, arrogance would have a disastrous consequences. His father's arrogance and need for petty vengeance had spawned his greatest enemy from his greatest ally, and poisoned many allies against him, and if Valerian was to be a good leader, he knew he needed to avoid repeating his mistakes. He sighed heavily, and moved to his next task, thinking to himself "Heavy lies the head that wears the crown."

(...)

_- Back on Char -_

A most un -Zerg like sensation crawled along Kestrel's spine as she waited to meet the approaching swarm of Basilisk. She was afraid. This uncomfortable realization was accompanied by a wash of shame, which in turn stoked the embers of her anger into a higher blaze in an odd circle. She knew she was much stronger than when she was birthed her, 4 short years ago, but she knew her strengths, and the thing that was coming for her was something she could not hope to match. She had been the first draft at the font of her Queen's experiments with Terrans, where as her adversary was the pure expression of physical perfection that could only be achieved within the swarm.

The horizon, as far as she could see, crawled with his brood, the entire line a chittering mass of deadly life. But the creature that came for her, moved alone, wanting to break her himself. Her first impression was that he was taller than she remembered.

He stood at about 8 feet, so that even at a mid distance, Emily found herself looking up at his face. The blood red eyes and sliver slit pupils glowed with pent up malice and an unquenchable thirst for blood. His dark brown plating was heavier than it had been, with deep black under plates adding to the total armor coverage. Large talons hooked from the tips of fingers and toes, and the elbow barbs had grown layers of jagged spines and sloped farther forward. Tusks had sprouted from two of the five mandibles that made up his chin, pointing up about 3 inches, while a pair of smaller teeth hung down from the point of the chin like a spike beard.

"Come, little insect. It is time you were crushed." His five mandibles moved like a solid lower jaw as he spoke in deranged glee, but parted as he hissed at her. His tail flicked lazily behind him. Kestrel's wings quivered, seeming small in the others daunting presence as she stood alone. Still about 30 yards separated the combatants, and Emily did not know much more than that she believed he would very likely be able to crush her if he could get a good grip on her. She chose to get the first strike in at least. She snapped her right hand up, shooting a pair of her barbed parasitic darts toward his eyes. He managed to bring his forearm up and block the projectiles, roaring as one of the sharp spines pierced flesh, but he was beyond her attempts to influence, and merely roared in anger and charged.

He was fast, closing in no time and leaping with a mighty slash which Kestrel had barly managed to dodge, raking at him with her wings, the tips striking sparks of his armor plates, but doing no real damage. His whipping tail caught her with a glancing blow to the shoulder that still managed to throw her off her feet and a few feet back. She rolled with the motion, just managing to dodge the hooked blade at the tip of the tail as it tore a chunk out of the ground. With the same move she bounce up, landing on her feet a dozen feet away. She leapt again.

She didn't like it. His overwhelming rage was blocking her ability to sense how he was going to move. All she could grasp for certain was that he wanted to make her suffer. She flapped once, pushing up and clear as the tail slashed, twisted and dove, slamming her knee into the side of his head, slashing as she whipped past. He managed to grab her outstretched wing as she pasted, but was unable to keep a grip on the hard, slick bone. But it still slowed her enough for him to bring his tail whipping around, slamming her in the gut and throwing her. Instead of getting tossed, she clung to the long, heavy appendage, and he beat the ground with it, spinning and flailing, trying to dislodge her. She hit the ground hard enough to make her plating crunch, even with the creep to soften the blows. Even with this pain, she knew she was safer here then where his claws could get her. He slammed her again, and quickly twisted and halted, the sheer force of the momentum change throwing her clear and bouncing like a skipping stone across the ground. She slid to a stop on her stomach, and shakily pushed herself up.

"Ugh... when am I going to win one of these?" She muttered to herself, before standing. Basilisk gave a hissing laugh.

"Poor little Kestrel should have stayed home. It would have taken longer for me to hunt you down."

"What purpose does this serve, Basilisk. I do not want control of the swarm!" She called through gritted teeth.

"Your lies do not sway me, little Kestrel. They is nothing here but feral Zerg for the taking. There is no other reason to come." He charged, and before she had a chance to move, his large hand gripped her throat, lifted her, and slammed her back to the ground, his face a mere 6 inches from hers. He was smiling savagely, his eyes shimmering, though she only recognized it as much because she could sense it. His horrible mandibles cold no longer form a human smile.

"But, I will make you an offer. Surrender your brood, and serve as my concubine, and I will allow you to live." She could clearly see what he imagined this to be like, and in an instant of revulsion so fierce she momentarily forgot her fear, she lashed out with the tips of her wings, stabbing at the soft regions near the elbow, tearing flesh and spurts of blood. He roared again, in pain and rage, his chin splitting in its many places in her face. As he lifted her slightly, she swung her wings back, dug the tips into the ground, and wrenched with all her might, jerking free of the monsters grip. She slid on her back when she landed for a few feet, flipped to her stomach, and attempted to flee. He managed to catch the outermost wing spur on her right side, and jerked hard, popping all the joints in her wing and pulling her back, before pivoting and hoisting the damaged spar, flipping her up over him and slamming her hard back into the ground. He released her wing, and she retracted it best she could, but the joints were all hyper extended and didn't respond with the speed she hoped for, and pain flared at every movement.

She curled in her limbs and rose to her hands and knees. She could feel the subtle shift in the beasts mind, like a tiny embankment crumbling away beneath the weight of a flood, as the pain stoked his rage and overwhelmed the meager, semi-sane portion of his mind. He rushed upon her, kicking out and catching her in the stomach plates, flipping her over in air, where she snapped her wings open, he damaged wing flaring with pain and not responding fully, throwing her off balance and landing her in a sprawl. The was a wet, sliding, slithering crunch noise as he summoned his bone blades. She pushed herself up, then threw herself backwards as he gave an upward slash with the now wickedly serrated blade. It was so sharp, and the cut so clean, she didn't even feel it at first. She just saw her left hand and forearm arc over her head in a spray of blood. Her eyes bulged and she fell backward, her arm, severed right below the elbow spurting weak blood as her systems closed of the clean sliced veins and arteries. She landed on her ass, stunned, watching the arm come up, and the slick bone, covered in Basilisk's own blood from his injured arm, glinting in the murky light. A dethatched part of her mind noticed that his blood was a sickly green, unlike her own, which was still a deep crimson.

Suddenly, as the blade arm fell, there was a flash of blue light and sizzle as the bone met resistance. Quirxen had appeared in front of her, intercepting the blow with his Psi-blade. He brought his other hand flashing up, rebuffing the stunned monster with a Psi Blast, before dancing forward, clashing again with the bone blade.

"Sereniya. Get the Matriarch to safety, I shall delay this beast." The thought was not directed at Kestrel, but she caught it none the less. A strong pair of mottled gray/purple hands hoisted her to her feet, before she tried feebly to shake them off.

"I did not call for your assistance."

"Do not argue, Matriarch." He shot back, dodging out of the way as the lizard swiped at him with his second blade and a rage filled roar. "Your life is too important to be spent here. We cannot allow this monster to take control of your portion of the swarm as well. Go." She hesitated.

"Very well." She let the female Protoss pull her away, where in Basilisk hiss/screamed in fury. He could not get around the more agile and calm adversary. As one, his swarm surged forward, as he was willing to lose the visceral pleasure of destroying her personally rather than let her get away. Not to be undone, Kestrel summoned her own brood, which had moved burrowed into range while she was getting her ass kicked. There were not enough to stop Basilisk's larger brood, but they would slow it down while she withdrew. The two waves of snarling creatures crashed with a noise so rending it could be felt as well as heard. She relented to the tugging alien, letting the taller being pull her away from the center of combat. Underlying the close in rumbling, there was a more distant, low growl.

Attracted by the conflict, numbers, and general psionic activity of the conflict, a number of feral Zerg charged the depression. Thousands of them. The crested and splashed down among the two controlled broods in waves, attacking in an undirected frenzy of violence. Kestrel now needed no further urging to abandon her hopeless conflict, the sheer number of feral zerg bearing down upon the arena not only dwarfed her own numbers, but even the superior number Basilisk had on tap. Not that that stopped him from trying to get clear of the more agile Protoss and murder Kestrel, but Quirxen was to skilled to allow that while he yet lived.

"Clear me a path." Kestrel said, indicating a path clogged with dueling Zerg that lead back toward the Cerebrates cradle. She folded her injured wing into its bracing as the taller being released her and, gathering her companions with a thought, and leapt into the fray. Kestrel lit her undamaged wing afire with a psionic fields, and rushed in as well, using the augmented blade wing as a cleaver to hue swaths of enemies back.

_Matriarch! The Cerebrate has finished loading its brood, and had reconsituted itself aboard the Leviathan._ Eris's voice rang through her head.

_Excellent. I am working my way back for pick up. Have everything prepared to leave this planet._ Her pain and weariness colored her mental voice.

_Yes, Mistress. Also, your pet human relates that you should keep your head down, she has sent in some reinforcements._ Before Kestrel could ask what she meant by this, she heard, over the drowning, screaming, chattering hoards around her, the drone of machinery. Over the low boarder of the valley, a full doze Banshee bombers topped, then dropped down, angling toward where Kestrel was fighting her way out of the depression. Exhaust trails ranged from the fan powered ships, blossoming into orange fireballs and raining gore as their bombs tore wide patches of Zerg to shreds, as the concussive waves knocked even more out.

There was a loud, furious roar behind the fleeing Zerg Matriarch, and with a mental jerk, she felt Quirxen fade from her consiousness, and she knew Basilisk was charging after her now.

_Return to the Leviathan. _ She sent to her surviving Protoss, while turning her own paltry Zerg directly upon her antagonist, dragging a number of feral Zerg with them. At the same time, she reached out, and spoke directly into the mind of one of her Banshee pilots. _Fly Low, and at me._ She directed, and sprinted, noting the one ship break off from the retreating fliers as they banked. It adjusted its height until it hovered only about ten feet over the heads of the dazed and still battling Zerg, and flew straight at Kestrel, who was twirling this way and that, slashing back the feral beasts with her one good wing. Then, as the Banshee closed, she spun, driving back as many as she could, drawing out her injured wing, and jumped with one mighty, agonizing flap, making it a good 30 feet straight up, before coming down, and land atop the speeding air ship. She braced with her good wing as the ship gained speed and elevation as it again banked to head back toward the Leviathan.

Weary and sore, she looked backward to see Basilisk, running on all 4's like a beast. She could feel the pure, unbridled urge to slaughter that was his sole driving mechanism now that the Queen was dead. And ifs he had not been the focus of this singular drive, she would have pitied the creature. As it was, she got another terrible surprise instead. Suddenly his head snapped up, and he spit something that splattered across the right hand fans. The Banshee shuddered as fans hitched as what turned out to be a potent acid immediately began to chew through the metal. The ship listed to the side, and Kestrel prepared to leap clear. She extended her damaged wing, and was on the verge of leaping clear to painfully flap her way to another mount, when the fear of her valiant Banshee pilot pulled at her mind as she battled to keep herself out of the carpet of Zerg below. At her present strength, she doubted she could keep herself air born for long. She knew it would both be unwise, and un-zerg-ish to try and save this human. But also, she knew that doing things like that is what separated, and made her better than that deranged thing below.

She decided in a split second, dug her clawed hand under the canopy, and ripped it up and off. She then grasp the terrified woman by the back of her coat, and with a mighty flap, sprung from the back of the falling ship. Beating her wings hard, she could barley keep them aloft, with her injured wing, the extra weight, and the uneven load. The pain rivaled that of what she experienced in her second "birth" and for a second her wing failed, and she dropped a few meters before she could force the appendage back into compliance. Then, through the haze of her pain, she saw her salvation, and with a surge of desperate strength, threw the girl she clutched, who screamed shrilly as she fell the 5 meters onto the wide, flat back of a feral Brood Lord that was contentedly throwing its spawn into the melee below. She managed a hal fal/half glide, and alighted in a heap upon the slow to react beast, driving her parasitic spines into the flesh between armor folds, and dominating the simple mind. It had turned, spweing a thick cluster of Broodlings at the infuriated Basilisk, before gliding quickly up, clear fo the range of his corrosive spit.

The Female human sat up as she guess she was going to live at least a little longer, clutching a sprained wrist from the fall to her chest. Kestrel simply lay where she had landed, no longer holding the strength to rise, panting in pain, looking not unlike a smashed Mosquito.

"Are... are you alright, Matriarch?" The woman asked, her gratitude overcoming her trepidation at speaking to the silent, frightful entity that had allowed her to live and serve once the Zerg had overrun the Dominion base she was stationed out of on the planet of Aster when it had been taken. She did not reply at once, and when she did, it was mentally.

_I believe I shall live._ Even her mental voice had a tired, breathless quality to it. _Barring any other encounters between now and docking._ The Woman was at first taken aback with the words popping into her head, not having dealt with a telepath before, but she acclimated with the speed of the jet pilot she was.

"Thank you, for not leaving me to that... _thing_." Her voice did a fair job of convey the terrified revulsion she held.

_Thank you... for making the bombing run that allowed me to break contact._ She said her mental voice weak. The woman motioned the praise away, the realized Kestrel could not see the gesture.

"My pleasure, Matriarch." And she didn't know why, but she extended a few more words, even though it had appeared that Kestrel had lost consciousness. She had drawn a handgun from her waist holster. "And if the bastards do try something else, I got you covered." Over the horizon, the dark blob that was Kestrels command Leviathan appeared, the Brood lord under them bearing straight at it, and the pilot had never been so glad to see a massive Zerg in her life.

**End 7.**

**Jeez, this one dragged on for ever (production wise, anyway.) Sorry bout that, folks. Got stymied and then school got ridiculous, and some other malarkey, and just... bleh. Anyway. I have... vauge ideas where the next chapter shall range, and I think some quality Hyperion time is in order, and possibly some more Kerrigan. (Also, have mostly read the Novel **_**Flashpoint**_** now, so I have a little more real data to feed from, and a good (in my opinion) little Valerian scene coming up, so... yeah. Thanks for staying around, guys and gals.**


	8. Limited Options

**Starcraft: Contingency**

**Disclaimer: I do Not own Starcraft.**

_**Warning: Spoilers for Heart of the Swarm contained herein.**_

**Chapter 8: Limited Options**

_-Two days and 8 randomized Hyperspace jumps from the Dominion attack on the Umojan facility housing the former Queen of Blades-_

Matt Horner, Captain of the heavily damaged ship _Hyperion_ breathed the easiest he had breathes since the entirety of the Dominion fleet had appeared and without a boast, taunt, or even screw you, opened fire upon his much abused ship. Not that he was a stranger to the constant harrying after the past few weeks since Kerrigan had been removed from command of the Zerg Swarm. But his relief, however scant, was to be short lived, and there was a wrenching shove, as if the ship had crashed into some solid body, and he was thrown to the metal deck plates. Worried and irritated as he was, he took a small bit of pleasure in noting that the Former heir to the dominion thrown, normally so unshakable, had also been thrown sprawling to the floor.

The lights on the bridge dimmed slightly, there was a long shudder, and a smaller jerk, and then the ship was still. He picked himself up, and the comm from engineering was already spouting a surprisingly articulate fountain of profanity that was impressive in its scope and structure. After a minute of dialogue with the lead engineer, the one handed, short, Viking-esk Rory Swann, He learned that the already damaged and haphazardly repaired engines were out, pending extensive repairs. Matt sighed, adding this to the already large piles of ways they were screwed. He hoped, however, that the randomized jumps, that had landed them somewhere outside the outer rim of Dominion occupied planets, and the fact that they no longer were harboring Kerrigan or, much to his ire, Jim Raynor, would be sufficient to leave them clear of the pursuing fleet for long enough to affect repairs. Much need repairs.

"I take it from Mister Swann's colorful wording, that the new is less than ideal?" The prince asked, his voice calm, and even after the tumble, managing to not look the least rumpled.

"No." He said frankly. While the ghost of mistrust was still in him, Valerian was in the same boat they were, now, and the royal had grown in esteem among the outlaw band. "We are dead in the water until we can get some serious repairs done. Swann says that the engines are completely offline, and that that turbulence we just experienced was the reactor core shutting down." While he talked, Matt brought up a holo of the ship, painted in red for the damaged areas, which made up roughly 60% of the observable map.

"They specifically targeted the engines with the heavy bombardment, and stalling to let Kerrigan return to go after Jim took its toll. Half the middle decks are holed, and we have a lot of external plate damage, but it seems to be largely superficial, or only extending into the outermost decks. Basically, we are floating dead until Swann can get something working, which he estimates is going to be a long time." He rubbed his chin, as he looked at his poor, hurt ship. "Hopefully, though, the rapidity that me made the jumps, and the random destinations, and final one, outside of dominion space, will give us the time we need." And as is wont to happen, at that moment, the Communications officer called in a worried tone.

"Sir!" Matt looked up, inwardly cursing, and already trying to figure out what he could do if the Dominion had already caught up to them. "We're being hailed... but... it's not a Dominion signal." Even Valerian cocked a perfectly sculpted brow at this.

"What do you mean?"

"The identifier coded to the sender indentifies it as belonging to a UED Battle Cruiser, _Leviathan._"

"UED?" Valerian exclaimed in surprise. "I thought they all got wiped out by Kerrigan, or made it back outside the sector at the end of the Brood Wars." Matt did not comment, but straightened his uniform, and took his spot at the comm terminal.

"A number of them deserted, and work with the Mercs and such out here on the rim." One of the other bridge staff answered, offhandedly.

"Put it through." Matt said, ready to try and bluff his way out of trouble. Many of the sensors were down, but the fuzzy radar screen still only painted a single large point, about 7000 Kilometers to their forward left orientation, too far to eyeball, and lost to the deep green planet that hung in the sky behind where the radar said the object was. Whatever he may have been expecting, what he saw was not it.

A slight, blonde woman, younger than himself, with a dusting of freckles across her nose and cheeks, and pale blue eyes fuzzed in on the screen. She was not scowling, but her expression was vaguely hostile.

"Crippled ship _Hyperion_, you have warped into Zerg space. Make no move toward hostility, or you will be destroyed.

(...)

Willow Sinclair watched the clearly rumpled man visible in the holo on the bridge that had been removed from the destroyed UED Battle Cruiser _Leviathan_ that had been installed within one of the ample cargo compartments within Kestrels own personal Leviathan. The main problem she had with having three different species was directing them in the field. She could, with an effort, often find and pick out her Protoss mentally, but it was not streamlined. So, she had found the wreckage of an old battle cruiser, had her people rip out the bridge equipment, and now it stood as the bristling hub of human activity within her area of operations. Now she could control the whole of her Brood, along with the Cerebrate and her Brood Mothers, while her Leviathan's parasitic worm creature, called Isis, could relay between the humans and Kestrel.

It had been a week since Kestrel had returned, half dead from the surface of the tortured home of the Swarm. She had lain unconscious for two whole days, Eris tending to the Swarm. And for her part, Willow had been an absolute wreck while she was out. Not because she feared what would happen if Kestrels influence over the Zerg dissipated, but because she worried for her strange love. She could do little, but still did all that was in her power to aid the convalescence of the Matriarch, and was so released when Kestrel awoke, that she herself, dizzy from days of stress induced insomnia, passed out. Her plates and wings had already healed to their normal states, but her missing forearm had merely scabbed over with its own plates, and was slowly re-growing. Another benefit of the Zerg transformation, she guessed. Kestrel stood, arms folded, back out of camera range, watching the screen intently as she let Willow talk to the invaders in her space. In honor of their faultless service and the loyalty of Quirxen in trading his life for hers, she had granted the Protoss the right to return to their people. She knew it was a great risk, but knew also that the Protoss she had living in her space were a brave, noble, honorable people, and if it were a bit naive, she really believed that they would not alert the others to her presence. But, much to her surprise, the main bulk of the Protoss on her planets chose to remain, which she took as both a compliment, and a sign that she was not fully trusted. Sereniya herself had said she was staying, that her place was here. Her mind had been shielded, but it almost seemed like she felt it as a duty.

The result of this was, that Kestrel was a bit extra paranoid, keeping the mainstay of her Zerg forces out of her main system, on either Neograd of Aster, and had her Leviathans constantly on patrol in case of covert insertion of hostile forces. And the sudden appearance of this Dominion ship seem to validate her paranoia.

On the screen, the young man, wore a navy blue coat, had close cropped black hair, and noble features, in a handsome, yet approachable look. He cocked a brow in query.

"I am sorry, did you say Zerg space?" He asked Willow. She, for the most part, enjoyed playing with some of the people she got to communicate with in the course of her duties as human voice of the Brood, and rarely did she get to intimidate. Kestrel sent her the metal go ahead, along with the feeling of her playful smile. Willow knitted her brows into a frown.

"Identify yourself." She said sternly, her voice falling an octave. On his end, Matt looked at this strange young woman, wondering what he was dealing with. He decided that he didn;t have enough cards up his sleeves to chance irritating her until he knew more about the situation he face.

"I am Captain Mathew Horner, of the _former_ Dominion ship _Hyperion_." He put a heavy emphasis on the word, wanting to make it clear that they were not friendly with the Dominion. Willow let her frown lift slightly, and leaned back, allowing her shoulders and chest to become visible, grabbed in her simple white technician style dress. She steepled her hands in front of her, resting her chin on the middle digit, her blue eyes looking intently at the man. Kestrel shot a brief amused laugh into Willows head. She had seen the posture in a movie, and was mimicking it trying to act tough, and Emily thought it was adorable. This made Willow smile slightly, the look coming of as predatory over the holo.

"And pray tell, Captain Horner, why you see fit to invade our space?" Matt contemplated his answer for a second.

"We were under attack from the Dominion fleet, they caught us with our pants down, and we took heavy damage while covering an... associate, hoping she could recover out commander. We had to jump out, and over the last two days, we have made as many randomized jumps as our engines could manage, hoping to lose any pursuit that might be tailing us. Our engines died when we landed in system, and will be inoperable until we can affect serious repairs." He saw no benefit in lying. Though he did not know that this UED Battle Cruiser could mount a significant threat, he could not afford the try and bluff at the expense of their good will. She leaned forward, her eyes flashing.

"So you jump into our space, possibly trailing the entire Dominion fleet?" She said in a low, dangerous voice.

A second figure, much to Willow's surprise (and Judging by the look on Matt's face, his as well) stepped into the view angle and addressed Willow. He was immaculate in dress and figure, and had an air of importance about him. Willow thought he was too pretty to be truly handsome, but conjectured that had her taste run to the traditional fare, she would have found him quite attractive.

"The odds that we were heavily tracked are slim, Madam." He said in a soothing voice that worked, even though Willow's anger was false. "We lost the primary target that the Dominion were after, and have, but only a short time previous, found that our secondary value has also been taken from us." Willow regained her faux composure with an impetuous gesture.

"Oh? And what makes you so clear in this?" Matt spoke again no, casting an agry look to his compatriot.

"We are a group of anti-Dominion rebels called "Raynor's Radiers." When we dropped warp about 9 hours ago, we caught a UNN news report saying our commander, James Raynor, had been executed." Willow was slightly taken aback at this.

"I am sorry for your loss." She said, before she could catch herself. She had heard, back when she lived on a non-zerg Bliss, about the good work the Raiders had been doing among the neglected outer colonies. She looked as if she were pondering what to do, but was in reality, getting her orders from Kestrels mental presence. Suddenly she took on a sly look, and spoke again. "Well, crippled or no, you have invaded our space. Disable your weapon systems, turn over docking control to us, and make no hostile action upon any of our crew, and we shall tow you into orbit, and allow you refuge on our planet." She rattled off in tight, controlled groups.

Matt looked stricken, and simply stared at the girl as she looked at him, her eyes giving nothing away. Valerian, however, continued to question her.

"But, miss..." He left the sentance hanging, and Willow picked up on the need to insert her name. " Sinclair, I thought you said we were within Zerg space?" She eyed this overly pretty blonde man, and she felt Kestrel send her the go ahead to say whatever she pleased, while she signaled that the Leviathan move toward the dead ship. Over at the radar station, the officer whispered to Matt that the other vessel was approaching rapidly.

"Indeed I did, Mister..." Now it was her turn to request a name, and Valerian automatically supplied his name while she confirmed it.

"Wait, Valerian Mengsk, as in, _Mengsk_?" She sat forward, looking the man in shock. Even Kestrel had leaned forward a bit at this. Valerian, to his credit, sighed, and looked slightly displeased.

"Yes, I am afraid so. But do to a difference of opinion with my father, I now find myself cast from the line of succession and of the Dominion." He's voice carried a bit of a bitter twinge, and something almost akin to disgust. He then looked right back into eyes of Willow. "But, seeing as James Raynor had been executed, and his primary quarry is unaccounted for, and not with us, he will view me a trifling affair unworthy of his resources." He was so frank in his manner, and the raw irritation of the matter, that both women believed the man.

"Hmm, very well, we will take your word for it, and still grant you asylum on our world. To answer your previous question, yes, this space, and much of surrounding vaccum is under the direct control of the Kestrel Brood of the swarm. Valerian again cocked an inquisitive, sculpted brow.

"But, how is that possible? All the Zerg went feral when the Queen of Blades fell. All we have seen have been little less than beasts since then." This piqued Kestrels interest, and would be explored once she got the men on the ground. She fed Willow enough to pacify the man, who know more than she would have expected.

"When the Queen was killed, it did sent a kind of Psionic backlash across all minds linked with her own. For the weaker units of the swarm, this destroyed their minds, and they became feral. But many of the Brood Mothers recovered, and were able to retain control of their brood, as was with my Matriarch.

"Your... Matriarch?" the two men seemed to blanch slightly. "Are you saying, that you are infested?" Willow made a disgusted face, wrinkling her brow.

"Eww, no. Nothing as crude as that. When my Matriarch was conquering this space, she allowed those of us who swore no hostility to her Zerg a chance to continue living, if we served her. The Matriarch has spared many civilians, and we boast a clean human population of over 9 million on Bliss alone." She answered, like this should be a common knowledge item. Now it was Matt's turn, and he leaned forward, skepticism etched across his face.

"So we are just to take your word for the fact that you are not infested, that you live in harmony with the Zerg, who, despite lacking the control of the Queen of Blades, have not devolved into feral horrors. We are just supposed to except this, and trust that we will not be killed if we allow you to take us to your home and surrender peacefully?" Willow cocked her head to the side, a half smile at the man's sheer bravado and incredulity.

"Your points and skepticism are well merited, Captain Horner. But if I may offer a counter point?" He eyed her with not quite challenge in his eyes. He nodded tersely.

"Please direct your gaze out of your main bridge viewport in the direction that one working radar dish says that our ship is coming from." She intoned, being fed data that Kestrel wanted her to know. The Captain looked away from them, as did the Heir to the Dominion, who proceeded out of the view angle, toward the bridge windows. When Matt returned his gaze to the screen, he looked far less happy then he had a second before. Willow smiled her best smile.

"As you can see, sir, the _Leviathan_, from which we pulled the bridge out of and loaded inside of the Zerg form under the same name, is an apt moniker. So, while I can understand, and indeed sympathize with your misgivings about the situation you are presented with, I must ask you one thing. Would firing your guns at us in a futile attempt to take down the Leviathan while you have not even the power to maneuver your ship really be any more likely to extend your lives than taking the chance and letting us tow you into orbit and be brought onto the surface?" Her smile broadened, and behind her, Kestrel too smiled. Willow had a way with words.

(...)

_-Meanwhile, back in Umojan space-_

She was alone. She knew it now. She reached out again, her mental net casting out as far as she could reach, looking for the familiar thread in the vas lonely sea of space. But it was not there, and she was alone.

A single tear burned a path down her cheek. All she felt was sorrow, a deep, pulsing pain that burned at the core of the soul she didn't know she still had. Even her rage was pushed down under the weight of this new form of torture. Absently, her hand stroked the hard chitin of the Zergling that had curled, dog like, at her feet. But she was unconscious of this, the only thing her mind could see at the moment was him.

He had recovered her, almost made her believe that she could be something more than she had been, and now he was gone, and she was alone.

"You are not alone, Sarah." She did not look up, didn't need to look at the visage of her other aspect, the thing Jim had died to pull out of her. "You still have me."

"I don't want you." She grunted into her arms, folded over her pulled up knees. The Queen of Blades, sitting in the pilot's seat of Jim's personal shuttle, had the seat rotated so that she faced Sarah.

"Then what do you want?" The voice was soft, loving, and carried a ghost of the sadness she felt herself. She went to make an angry retort, but paused, lifting her head to look at the Queen.

"What?" She had never had a choice in what she wanted to do before. Not really. From her conscription to the Ghost Program, to her more willing Conscription into the Sons of Korhal, and then her conscription into the Swarm, she had always been directed. As leader of the Swarm, she had still been bowed to the same overriding goal as the Overmind. Even when Jim had ... liberated her, she had been under his and Valerian obligation.

"What do you want to do?" She asked again, her voice almost a consoling purr. "You are free of the constraints the Overmind placed upon you. With Raynor gone, Valerian gone, and Mengsk, at least temporarily unaware of where we are, we could just fade away. Of course, he will keep looking for us, but we are good, and if we wanted, he couldn't find us. We know lots of nice places to hide." This thought held a lot more appeal that she wanted to admit. Her rage at the horrors that Mengsk had committed against her and the man she loved, and to all those that stood against him, still burned, but she was so tired of the hate. And if it had had Jim, she felt she could have just let it go, run off with him, or joined his little band of guerrillas, if they would accept her after what she had, especially most recently, done. But, and if for nothing else, Mengsk was going to pay for Jim's sake.

"I... I am going to kill Mengsk." The Queen smiled conciliatorily.

"A noble goal, Sarah. How?" Kerrigan's eyes narrowed, but she did not speak, so the Queen continued. "You and I both know you cannot just stroll into the Palace, kick down the door, and smash his skull in with one of the busts of himself he no doubt keeps there. To even breach into the inner core of worlds, you would need an army, and, I doubt Valerian, even if we could find him and trust him, would be able to drum up the support we'd need." Sarah turned around, not wanting to face what she knew she had to do. "Come back to us, Sarah." The Queen whispered in a tone that carried softly. Kerrigan flexed her shoulders, almost as if her muscles were trying to flex the wings that were no longer there. Something in her mind clicked, and she turned to the Queen.

"You have called me nothing but Sarah since you first appeared. Why?" The Queen smiled down at her.

"For the same reason that James did, while everyone else has reffered to you as Kerrigan, or the Former Queen of Blades. It's because I am you, Sarah, and like James, I love you. When I look at you, I see not just the glorious and beautiful figure who dominated and controlled the Zerg Swarm and pushed it to be greater than it ever had been before. I see the little girl, upset when she accidently smashed a butterfly, who carries the burden of those she slaughtered even when she was not in her full capacity, and could do naught to stop it. I know you, and respect you, and I do not fear you." She stood, and Sarah followed suit, glaring, caught between skepticism and gratitude to, what was in all likelihood a figment of her own tortured brain. The Queen smiled at her doubts warmly.

"Look at it this way, Sarah, if I am a figment, I am still only just you, and I still love you, which means that, even after all the guilt and everything, you still love you, even if you hate you too, and that is pretty fundamentally important." Sarah gave a wet chuckle, despite herself. The Queen opened her arms, offering to embrace the human. "Come home, Sarah, come back to us. The Overmind's taint has been washed pure from you. You have the power to make us great, and we are waiting for you to come back. Lets nail the slimy bastard." Sarah shakily nodded, and moved in to hug the Queen. The Zergling in the shuttle looked up, noting nothing it could comprehend as strange, but deep in its tiny, reptilian complex of a brain, it knew it's master was back.

Sarah pulled back from the embrace, her eyes clear, a fire burning deep within, but kindled, for the first time in almost 6 years, with something in supplement to base, incoherent rage.

"Where do we start?" She said, her voice strong, hard, and egaer. The Queen smiled again, a large, predatory grin.

"Reach out with your mind, Sarah, find your Leviathan, out among the stars, waiting for your call to stir it." And suddenly, like a veil was lifted in her mind, she was able to, weakly at least, feel some of her Zerg. And while she could not directly dominate the hibernating creature from here, she could feel where she needed to go.

"I can feel it. Why?" She had been able to link with the Zerg in the Umojan facility, but only through ones in close proximity, or to others dominated by her.

"The ability had ever left you, Sarah. It just needed you to want it to reawaken." Sarah took her seat, strapped in, and punched in the coordinates that would take her to her destination. She gave a quick grin.

"Let's go reclaim my empire." And she punched the button, and her shuttle jumped to warp.

**End 8. Short piece, but I wanted to get some more out, rather than a complete, longer one later.**


	9. Zerus

**Starcraft: Contingency**

**Disclaimer: I do Not own Starcraft.**

_**Warning: Spoilers for Heart of the Swarm contained herein.**_

**Chapter 9: New Regime**

_-Zerus-_

The Queen of Blades floated in the murky depths of the ravaged landscape that was Kerrigan's mind. Deep in its deepest layers, it pulsed and seethed, but was nothing compared to the agony that flared along her bodies nerve endings. But she endured it, because she knew it was necessary. Deep within herself, she was strangely clam, serene with the knowledge that this is what she needed to do, and that the pain was signifying her purification.

She had initially be skeptical, when Zeratul had appeared in her Leviathan to direct her to Zerus. Thinking he had come to finish her while she was weak, a deed that she considered him as completely justified in attempting, from what she recollected of her acts against him, or for what she had been forced to do to that Protoss Colony. But he had absorbed her attacks, and instead of fighting back, showed her where she must go. And so she had gone to the birthplace of her peo... of the Zerg, and learned of the corruption of the flase God Amon, and the Betrayal of the Overmind, and of her own place in this whole affair. But that could wait. She had one goal, and one goal only. Kill Mengsk.

Eyes snapped open in the fluid filled cocoon, and Kerrigan roared in pain, and fury and esctasy. She felt familiar, yet alien shoulder muscles flex, as new blade wings arched, then decended, cleaving the protective sheaf around her in two, spilling liquid down and away, leaving her standing, reborn, powerful as she had never been before. Her back arched, wings spread, and she roared to the heavens, the swirling mass of primal and her own Zerg, defending her cocoon while she baked were pushed back by a wall of force as her cry of victory shook the sky. Violet steam wafted over the ground as her psionic wave burned the earth bare, Zerg, plants, rocks fading to dust as her power blossomed to a radius of about 30 feet to all sides.

Her wings drooped, her nerve cords relaxed, and her eyes opened, as the echo of her roar died away, and she surveyed the scene with lightly glowing purple eyes. She felt a slight warm glow in the center of her being. It was not quite joy, but more the sense of ease that comes with coming home after being away. A primal Hydralisk lunge, oversized scythe arms out and straining to shred... when it simply halted in mid air, and then disintegrated. Another leapt at her from the back, and faded in the same way. She flexed her wings, before flapping them wide, pulsing the area around her with a wave of pure Psionic destruction, scouring vegetation, water, and Zerg clean from the entire clearing that housed the pool of her rebirth. She spread her arms and pushed the balloon of Psionic death, listening with interest to the different pops and sizzles the various Zerg, both her own and the primal. Now that everything within striking distance was dead, she stretched, flexing old and new muscles and plates, tested her new wingspan, and assessed he familiar, yet different new body. She was lighter, but knew her plating was stronger than ever. He claws we longer and sharper, and her Psionoics... well, She would have to test it, but she felt a templar of near it's second or third century would be hard pressed to best her in straight mental combat. And the welcome sense of unity that came with full integration back into her swarms hive mind. She let the sensation of oneness wash back into her bones, from the eager twittering of the Zerglings, to the coiled stoicism of the Hydralisks, and even the mountainous confidence of an Ultralisk. She had come home after a long an weary absence. She felt... whole again, save for a painful, ragged edged hole in her core where Jim's memory lived. A smile tugged spasmodically at her mouth as she became aware of the most welcome segment of her transformation splashed over her senses.

This time, she was herself. Free from any controlling influence outside her own desires and motivations. And it felt good. She felt a tug in her mind, a challenge from one of the Primals of a few hundred years evolution was gibbering at her. The poor thing was no doubt as physically perfect as it's environment demanded, but it's mind's protection was weak. She plucked its location from it without any effort. She stalked off, her wings twitching and dipping with each step.

A dry, throaty chuckle escaped her as she recalled, in part, her statement upon the eradication of the untrustworthy Cerebrates and the decimation of her "Allies" way back when. Then, she had been an angry, driven monster. Not this time. She had only a couple, less inflammatory words this time around, and reflected again who she had become.

"I, am Sarah Kerrigan. I, am the Swarm." She smiled, her newly heightened senses able to pick up the Zerg scrambling and roiling after her, as she went to reclaim her crown.

(...)

"If I am such a disgusting abomination, why do you continue to stare at me?" Kestrel snapped suddenly, causeing Matt Horner, who was seated close to the fire across from where she stood, at the outermost edge of its light, to jump violently.

The humans from the crippled ship _Hyperion_ had been dirt side for more that 2 local weeks now, and had been incessant in their urging, wheedling, and cajoling into getting her to allow them to leave her planet, and return to... whatever it was they were to do. Even probing the brain of the pretty male human, Valerian, had shown that they had no real plan of action, now that their leader had been killed. She could sympathize with that part. She herself had been relatively lost since the Queen of Blades had been killed. Yes, these Terrans bore the mental markers signifying that they had been present during the battle that claimed her, but their insistence that they had in fact removed the Zerg portions of her, and reconstituted her as a human, she bore with malcontent and short temper. But as much as they tended to irritate her, these, "Core World" humans were amusing. She would oft watch, though the eyes of one of her many extensions, as the stocky engineering chief would swear merrily as he and his small staff used their own equipment to try and piece their craft back into working condition.

But she could not allow them to leave, and thereby compromise her own seclusion and secrecy. Again, in the head of the young Mengsk, she saw no knowledge that functioning parts of the Swarm we even conceived possible, much less in existence and operating independent of the Queen of Blades. This was good news, as it meant that even when the Dominion finished eradicating the primary Hive on char, Kestrel would have her Billions of Zerg still safely pocketed away, unmolested, in case she needed to make a move.

The human, Horner, looked strangly uncomfortable, having been called out on his very true thoughts, for he had been musing that she was inhuman, yet he had also caught himself staring at her as well. Truthfully, standing at the edge of the firelight, with all but her face completly in the shadow, it was easy to forget that she was Zerg.

"Well... aren't you one of Narud's... creations?" She had been playing around with an idea, mentally overlaying herself with some screens of Psi Energy.

"What is Narud?" She asked, and then sifted through and assimilated the brief burst of thoughs that raced through the mans mind. She snorted in disgust, and returned to lacing Psychic screens around herself.

"No, I am not one of those... _things._ I was crafted by the hand of the Queen of Blades herself to be a faithful general to her purpose. And now that she is gone, I can only continue to do what I see fit to." She finished screening herself, gave herself a look from the eye of a nearby Hunter-Killer, was satisfied, and stepped out into the better part of the firelight.

"Oh, my. I am sorry, I thought you were the Matriarch." Matt flushed with embaressment as the slender young woman emerged and moved, taking a seat across the fire from him. The bulky shadow forms of the Hydralisks edged closer to the light.

"I am." The woman balled her one hand over the stump of the other, and rested her chin on them, her slightly luminous green eyes reaching him even through the dancing flames. "This appearance, is just a little... trick I came up with while I studied the Psionics of my Dark Templar allies." To Horner's eyes, she looked like a woman, somewhere under 30, with black hair, slightly slanted eyes, and was dressed in what looked like an old Confederate Ghost hard suit. He gave a chuff of admiration.

"That's a hell of a trick." She shrugged.

"No more diffucult that one of the Templar bending the light to hide themselves from view. I simply bend it the way I wish, and I can appear as I wish." She flexed a portion of her passive focus, and the image of the woman dissolved slowly, like steam, until the glittering carapace was again prominent. Matt, still tweaked about insulting his host, brought the subject back to what she had said before she had moved in.

"You said that Kerrigan made you. I did not know she had the capabilities to do that." This was still a touchy subject, but Kestrel, sensing that he was simply stating a fact borne of ignorance, and meaning no disrespect, chose not to take offence.

"Yes. She created me, and then, using the knowledge gained, forged a number of others. There are two, that I am aware of, out in the void, but I avoid them. I cannot attest for any others, but she seemed to have grown...bored with her manipulations of terrans when she finished me, though I had not directly interacted with her in more than two years before she was killed." Matthew was quite for a moment, and Kestrel did not bother to read his mind. Their "negotiations," as the humans liked to call their prattling at her, had all followed a similar road, and she figured that this would too. She let her eyes rove, taking in the twinkling stars, and the slew of other fires and merriment going on about her.

She had parked the _Hyperion_ out in the rural area of her planet, far from any active Zerg hives, to a place where it was mainly human settlement, and a handful of Protoss who worked at raising livestock and crop. One thing she liked about keeping the humans alive, was that her Zerg could literally flourish on the staggering amount of waste the humans produces. All organic waste, from plant husks, to livestock trimmings, her Zerg could consume, and so streamlined was their metabolism, that the amount of waste fed far more Zerg than the prime selection did in humans. Even their considerable In-organic waste and excrement could be dissolved by the creep. She did not bother with calculations, but it seemed that in this way, she had a fairly stable cycle that could support a large density of Zerg, without needing to conquer and consume the actual terrans.

The fire that she was sitting at was one of around a dozen that the farmers liked to light at night, drinking, eating, dancing, or just relaxing after a hard day. Kestrel often liked to hang around such areas. The din and feel of life that had minds of its own, not just outlets of her will, was appealing.

"May I ask a question?" Horner said tentatively, snapping her out of her reverie.

"Sure."

"Well, you can read our minds, so I know you have seen in our heads that the Queen of Blades is not dead, at least, as far as we know, but returned to human form. Why do you refuse to believe us?" Not the question she was expecting. Kestrel was quite for a long minute, thinking it over, staring into the flickering heat of the flames.

"Have you even been linked mentally with a superior being? A link of the sort where your stability and very life are bound to that other being?" She did not wait for him to answer, because she knew that there was nothing in the human experience. As she had posed the question, Valerian had walked up, carrying a pair of steaming mugs he had acquired while traveling about the fires, listening to the people. He handed one to Horner, and, in an unexpected movement, regarded Kestrel, and then held up the other, offering it to her. Her eyes narrowed slightly as she looked back at him, then shook her head the barest fraction. But she was slightly impressed by the gesture.

"It is not an easy thing to explain. But this mental link, with it, the Queen is literally connected to me, in the same way I am connected to one of my own lower Zerg. With this link, anything from full control, to view, to termination can be done with a whim. But it is much more then just that. Because of the nature of this link, if the primary of the connection is severed, it causes a quite... substantial backlash to the underling." She lifted her gaze, and her eyes burned balefully in the low, flickering light.

"I Experienced this, and while I do not quite think it almost killed me, it did cause me to temporarily loose myself. I am told I became little more that a crippled beast, though my own recollection is blank. And when I recovered my faculties, I was physically unwell for many days after, and lost all ability to manipulate my own links or Psionics. So, when I say I know the Queen of Blades is dead, it is because I was subject to the backlash of her connection snapping. This trauma is why many Feral Zerg are unable to be recovered, Their minds cannot withstand the trauma of their primary being killed." Valerian took a sip of his drink, then posed his own question.

"But could this link be affected by... incapacitation or something like a Psi Disruptor?"

"I have not personally seen this effect, but yes, to an extent, the link can be disabled that way, but the effect is not nearly so pronounced. But even if I had initially hoped that it was something as simple as a disconnect, I had my conviction confirmed when I traveled to Char. The final remaining Cerebrate was mentally present when she died. And I would not doubt his word. He was the closest being to the Queen, having been spared by her during her ascension, and having watched over her transition into the Swarm. He has a was bound to her in a way even I could not fully grasp." She briefly wonder if she was jealous of this, but decided she was not. While she was still not positive how much of her loyalty and adoration for her queen was her own, and how much of it was an aspect of her breeding, she chose to think her attraction was genuine, as she felt the same as she had before she died.

It was hard to decide what she should do. It had not been a struggle back when Kerrigan lived, for she felt as much enamored as she had when under the full pressure of her direct influence.

"So I can say, without a trace of doubt, whatever it is you saw, it was NOT the Queen of Blades." She said it with a slightly savage bite to it, showing that this avenue of conversation was closed. So, the humans changed the talk to more genial topics, from admiring the way she ran her land, the peace that was kept between the three races under her, and talk of dissent with the way the Dominion was being run. Suddenly, Kestrel rose, interrupting Matt as was talking.

"Very well. I shall allow you to leave. What I have seen shows that you are unable to threaten what I have established, and I recognize that you understand my ability to crush you if you do constitute an irritation." She had not quarreled with wanting to let them go, but rather, she needed them to go. She knew that if she detained them, they would not be contented, like most of her inhabitants, to remain indefinably upon this, or one of her other planets. Forcing them to remain, they would, either on purpose, or accidently, stir up the sedentary population, and then she would have to put down a rebellion or to, breeding a cycle of dissatisfaction that would cause her constant problems with her human subjects.

Straight up killing the lot of them presented similar problems. Suddenly killing humans for no clear reason would breed dissent and nervousness, and cause stirrings among the population.

Her safest option was simply to send them on their way. Many, if not all the non-militarized population had been born, or homesteaded their own land on one of her planets, and would feel no desire to leave. So, her only satisfactory option was to get these people off her planet. She half turned away, looking back over her shoulder for the effect of acting as if she was dismissing them. "You will tell your Engineering chief that he shall allow my Zerg and technicians to expedite your repairs." She fixed Matt with her faintly luminous green eyes. "You way chose to ither trust my intentions, or remain grounded upon this world until you expire or irritate me sufficently. You have until morning to decide which corse of action you'd rather partake of." She turned her head with a swish and clacking of her nerve cords, walked a few feel to the blond woman who had greeted them upon their arrival in Zerg Space, and offered her hand, which the woman took happily, before moving off in the direction of her Infested command center/ primary hive.

"You ever get the feeling you've been beaten at a game before you've even made your first move?"

"Yes." Valerian remarked. Matt sighed heavily.

"Lord give me strength, I do not relish telling Swann that he has to take the backseat on this one." He Rubbed his eyes, looked at his mug, dumped the swill into the fire, and stood, wondering if he should requisition a couple of burly fellows to help him give his orders.

(...)

Sarah Kerrigan looked with faint distaste at the hillock sized corpse of the ancient Zerg-form that lay slumped before her in a spreading pool of its own life blood. She shook her hand, splattering the ground at her feet with gore as the Ancient Zurvan's blood sloughed smoothly off her clean, slightly glossy plates. She glanced more closely at her hand, noticing that the ick had even washed cleanly from the groves and buckles of her knuckle plates. No gore even remained caked at the joining of her talons. She was glad the blood came away so easily; she wanted off this planet now that her work was concluded, and she did not wish to venture to find a water source with which to scour herself.

She felt a slight, distant twinge of disgust with herself as she caught the image of how she would have cleansed her battle worn talons in the past, and her alter ego, the Tainted Queen of Blades, flashed a predatory smile and patted her new, Primal avatar on the cheek lovingly.

"So quick to dismiss our more..." She swept one hand in a tight circle as she searched for a word "... bestial aspects, aren't you, Sarah?" Sarah did not answer, but fixed her lambent purple eyes out to the lesser forms that were already scurrying to claim the meal that the giant carcass provided.

"I am not... dismissive of them. They just... are not... ME, anymore." Her brows furrowed under her scab like "hair" line, a remorseful expression of doubt taking hold of her features. The Tainted Queen bubbled a little giggle.

"Imagine this, Sarah Louise Kerrigan brings civilization to the Zerg Swarm." Sarah gave a small, pained grin at the thought, and clenched her fist, bringing it up to her face to examine the new, beauty that it's construction gained. So much rage had gone from her now. She could feel the power inside her, like an electric charge, stronger than anything she'd ever encountered before. It reminded her in a way of what she had felt off of some of the ancient Templar she had bested during her conflicts in the Brood Wars. A deep, calm, radiant strength. But now, there was a new facet to her power, one she had not noticed, or if she had been in her Tainted Queen of Blades state, would not have cared about. She felt clean, way down deep where she'd imagine that the ciders of her soul resided. She brought her eyes up and focused on one of her Hydralsks, slavering a few feet away. It was ugly, rust colored and angular, and it disgusted her. She flicked her eyes over again, finding one of Dehaka's Primal Zerg. It's form was as ugly as the twisted beast it severed, but in it's strange limbs and misshapen features, there was a beauty in it's purity. It was clean, untainted by the design of a false fallen god. In less then a though, she sent to Abathur commands to begin spinning Zerg out of her new, pure, primal strands. She would have to purge all her Zerg that could not be retooled with her newfound purity. But the Swarm would be cleansed, and strengthened. Conquest for the sake of conquest no longer mattered. She found that she cared not for eliminating the Protoss, now that the dark voice in the depths of her dreams was purged. All that mattered now was Mengsk.

She did not delude herself into believing that she sought his head for the good his, or even her people. Her grievance was personal, just as his had been with her, back before the Overmind took her. And now, she would Avenge Jim too. After that... well, she did not know. But for the first time in 4 years, when she looked to the future, she didn;t see a throne of bones and rivers of blood and death. She saw nothing, but it was a nothing she could choose. She summoned her Leviathan.

"Dehaka." She called, her voice firm, but not unkind. A flat order. "Gather your pack to my Leviathan. We are leaving." The Ungainly monster gave a deep bow.

"I follow. Much Essence to collect. Excited." He grunted, his voice clicking at odd points, and stumped off to where he saw the Leviathan would land.

(...)


End file.
